Tracing Contemporary Chinese Art: An Ethnographic Journey Through a Decade in Shanghai 9789819926688

Table of contents :
Acknowledgement
Contents
1 Introduction
Part 1: Contemporary Chinese Art?
Part 2: Historiographic Strategies
Part 3: Ethnographic Journey
References
2 Rockbund Art Museum—A Museum’s History of the Present
Part 1: Historical Context of the Shanghai Museum in the Late Qing Dynasty
Part 2: Establishment of the Rockbund Art Museum
‘Better City, Better Life’—Surreal Reality of the Newly Renovated Bund
Former Director—Adopting the Non-Delineated Rules of the Game
Inaugural Exhibition and Lai Suddenly Stepping Down
Part 3: The Museum’s Transformation
Searching for New Directions and Financial Security
Operation Manager and Media Relation Officer—Seizing Chances to Leverage the Real-Estate Project and Social Media
Conclusion—A Historical Picture of the ‘Contemporary Epoch’, Top-Down Power and Bottom-Up Initiatives
References
3 Long Museum and Yuz Museum—A Heterotopic Vision Mediated by Billionaires
Part 1: Long Museum—A Museum’s Transformative Possibilities for Cultural Imagination
Leisure and Aesthetic Experimentation—Architecture and Urban Design as a New Form of Lifestyle
The Eternal Thread—Bourgeois’s Complex Love Towards Her Mother
Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland—A Productive Revolutionary Subjectivity
1927–2017 Army Day 90th Anniversary—Between Chinese Identity and the Art Market
Part 2: Yuz Museum—Museum Owner’s Creation of a Legacy
Atrium, Restaurant and Blockbuster Exhibitions
Chief Executive Officer—A Successor Continuing the Legacy
Conclusion—Heterotopic Vision Brought by the Billionaires
References
4 Art districts—A reflection on the fate of Chinese cities
Part 1: West Bund
Context—Unstoppable Urban Expansion
MadeIn Gallery—Trajectory of Distinct Locations and a Spatial Path of Art History
2018 and Beyond—The Only Constant in Life is Change
Part 2: Red Town
Hongqiao Leting—An informal Art Space
Red Town—An Ever-Expanding Art District
Zheng Peiguan—Leveraging Art and the Real-Estate Bubble
Minsheng Art Museum—No Answer is also an Answer
2018 and Beyond—Development is the Truth
Conclusion
References
5 Commercial Gallery—A Reinvention of Self in the ‘Charismatic-Networked Game’
Part 1: Shanghart and Xu Zhen’s Studio—Cooperation Emerged in Multilayer Networks
Shanghart—Urban–Rural Divide in Art Production and Consumption
2020—A New Landmark in the Making
Xu Zhen’s Studio—An ‘Art Factory’ Carrying Forward the Essence of Old State-Run Factories
Part 2: Shanghai Gallery of Art and Vanguard Gallery
Vanguard Gallery
Conclusion—A ‘Charismatic-Networked Game’ Invented by Multiple Actors
References
6 In-Between Spaces—A Global Adventure for Collectors and Curators
Part 1: Uli Sigg
Part 2: Biljana Ciric
Part 3: Zhang Ga
Conclusion
References
7 Conclusion—Intervention to Existing Sociology and Art History Paradigms
Expanding the Notion of Formal Analysis and Aesthetic Appreciation: Exploring the Role of Individual Agency
Rethinking Periodisation—A Historical Picture of the ‘Contemporary Epoch’
Expanding Beyond Institutions and Urban Studies: Embracing a Broader Topology of Spaces
Rethinking Globalisation and East/West Dichotomy
Intervening Existing Knowledge in Sociology and Art History
What Does the Future Hold?
Reference
Index

Citation preview

CONTEMPORARY EAST ASIAN VISUAL CULTURES, SOCIETIES AND POLITICS

Tracing Contemporary Chinese Art An Ethnographic Journey Through a Decade in Shanghai

Isaac Leung

Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics

Series Editors Paul Gladston, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia Frank Vigneron, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong Yeewan Koon, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong Island, Hong Kong Lynne Howarth-Gladston, Sydney, NSW, Australia Chunchen Wang, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China

Editorial Board Jason Kuo, University of Maryland, Baltimore, College Park, MD, USA Christopher Lupke, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada Paul Manfredi, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA Ted Snell, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia Hongwei Bao, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK Ting Chang, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK Gerald Cipriani, National University of Ireland, Galway, Galway, Ireland Katie Hill, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, UK Birgit Hopfener, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada Takako Itoh, University of Toyama, Toyama, Japan Darren Jorgensen, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia Beccy Kennedy, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK Franziska Koch, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany Taliesin Thomas, AW Asia, New York, NY, USA Wei-Hsiu Tung, National University of Tainan, Tainan, Taiwan Ming Turner, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan Meiqin Wang, California State University, Northridge, Los Angeles, CA, USA Yungwen Yao, Tatung University, Taipei City, Taiwan Bo Zheng, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

This series brings together diverse perspectives on present-day relationships between East Asian visual cultures, societies and politics. Its scope extends to visual cultures produced, disseminated and received/ consumed in East Asia – comprising North and South Korea, Mongolia, Japan, mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan – as well as related diasporas world-wide, and to all aspects of culture expressed through visual images, including across perceived boundaries between high and popular culture and the use of traditional and contemporary media. Taken into critical account are cultural, social and political ecologies currently shaped by geopolitical borders across the East Asia region in addition to their varied intersections with an increasingly trans-cultural world. The series emphasizes the importance of visual cultures in the critical investigation of contemporary socio-political issues relating to, for example, identity, social inequality, decoloniality and the environment. The editors welcome contributions from early career and established researchers.

Isaac Leung

Tracing Contemporary Chinese Art An Ethnographic Journey Through a Decade in Shanghai

Isaac Leung Chinese University of Hong Kong Hong Kong, China

ISSN 2662-7701 ISSN 2662-771X (electronic) Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics ISBN 978-981-99-2667-1 ISBN 978-981-99-2668-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2668-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Xinzheng This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgement

The journey of writing this book has been an extraordinary and transformative experience, both academically and personally. It spans over a decade, and I owe its completion to the support and kindness of numerous individuals who have touched my life in profound ways. First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Prof. John Nguyet Erni. Without his support, my academic journey would not have been possible. I would also like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Dr. Linda Lai, whose support throughout this project has been invaluable. Her assistance has served as a guiding light in my academic pursuits. To my dear friend Jan Cho, who has been by my side since I embarked on my artistic dreams at the tender age of eighteen, I cannot thank you enough. You have been not only an emotional pillar during times of stumbling but also an exceptional mentor in shaping my journey. Jeremy Cheung, his encouragement during challenging times over the years have meant the world to me. During the final stages of manuscript preparation, I faced the loss of Violet Lau, whose inspirations and support over the decades were instrumental in bringing this book to life. She will forever be remembered with love. My sincere appreciation goes to my friends Alfred Mo, Orin Chung, Gavin Chan, Ellen Pau, Chau Truong, and Yoshie Suzuki. Their dedication to me and my artistic career has been an essential foundation for my academic and creative growth, and I owe them a debt of gratitude beyond words. To Ryan Tsai, your support has been my pillar of strength during countless nights of research and writing, v

vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

especially through the challenges of the pandemic. Having you in my life has been a true blessing. I am acutely aware that this book would not have come to fruition without the valuable insights and real-life stories contributed by my artist friends in Mainland China. I extend my thanks to Yan Xiaodong and Li Zhenhua, whose support allowed me to expand my network within Shanghai’s and Beijing’s art community. Special thanks to Zheng Weimin for sharing his enthusiasm and in-depth knowledge of the Chinese art world during my time in Shanghai. I am immensely grateful to organisations like Videotage, whose facilitation of my curatorial project, One World Exposition, has provided invaluable resources for understanding the complexities of the Chinese art world portrayed in this book. I extend my heartfelt thanks to Agnes Lin for her generous support and unwavering belief in my project at the Osage Gallery. Finally, to my parents, I am forever indebted to your boundless love and unwavering support. You provided me with the best education and stood by me throughout my life, nurturing me as a scholar, an artist and, above all, as a person. Without the collective encouragement and help from these remarkable individuals and organisations, this book would not have been possible. My heartfelt appreciation goes out to each one of you for being an integral part of this incredible journey.

Contents

1

Introduction Part 1: Contemporary Chinese Art? Part 2: Historiographic Strategies Part 3: Ethnographic Journey References

2

Rockbund Art Museum—A Museum’s History of the Present Part 1: Historical Context of the Shanghai Museum in the Late Qing Dynasty Part 2: Establishment of the Rockbund Art Museum ‘Better City, Better Life’—Surreal Reality of the Newly Renovated Bund Former Director—Adopting the Non-Delineated Rules of the Game Inaugural Exhibition and Lai Suddenly Stepping Down Part 3: The Museum’s Transformation Searching for New Directions and Financial Security Operation Manager and Media Relation Officer—Seizing Chances to Leverage the Real-Estate Project and Social Media Conclusion—A Historical Picture of the ‘Contemporary Epoch’, Top-Down Power and Bottom-Up Initiatives References

1 3 7 12 16 19 20 22 22 25 28 32 32

35 38 40 vii

viii

3

4

5

CONTENTS

Long Museum and Yuz Museum—A Heterotopic Vision Mediated by Billionaires Part 1: Long Museum—A Museum’s Transformative Possibilities for Cultural Imagination Leisure and Aesthetic Experimentation—Architecture and Urban Design as a New Form of Lifestyle The Eternal Thread—Bourgeois’s Complex Love Towards Her Mother Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland—A Productive Revolutionary Subjectivity 1927–2017 Army Day 90th Anniversary—Between Chinese Identity and the Art Market Part 2: Yuz Museum—Museum Owner’s Creation of a Legacy Atrium, Restaurant and Blockbuster Exhibitions Chief Executive Officer—A Successor Continuing the Legacy Conclusion—Heterotopic Vision Brought by the Billionaires References Art districts—A reflection on the fate of Chinese cities Part 1: West Bund Context—Unstoppable Urban Expansion MadeIn Gallery—Trajectory of Distinct Locations and a Spatial Path of Art History 2018 and Beyond—The Only Constant in Life is Change Part 2: Red Town Hongqiao Leting—An informal Art Space Red Town—An Ever-Expanding Art District Zheng Peiguan—Leveraging Art and the Real-Estate Bubble Minsheng Art Museum—No Answer is also an Answer 2018 and Beyond—Development is the Truth Conclusion References Commercial Gallery—A Reinvention of Self in the ‘Charismatic-Networked Game’ Part 1: Shanghart and Xu Zhen’s Studio—Cooperation Emerged in Multilayer Networks Shanghart—Urban–Rural Divide in Art Production and Consumption

43 44 45 47 48 50 52 53 54 59 61 63 64 65 66 70 73 74 75 77 80 84 85 87 89 90 91

CONTENTS

2020—A New Landmark in the Making Xu Zhen’s Studio—An ‘Art Factory’ Carrying Forward the Essence of Old State-Run Factories Part 2: Shanghai Gallery of Art and Vanguard Gallery Vanguard Gallery Conclusion—A ‘Charismatic-Networked Game’ Invented by Multiple Actors References 6

7

In-Between Spaces—A Global Adventure for Collectors and Curators Part 1: Uli Sigg Part 2: Biljana Ciric Part 3: Zhang Ga Conclusion References Conclusion—Intervention to Existing Sociology and Art History Paradigms Expanding the Notion of Formal Analysis and Aesthetic Appreciation: Exploring the Role of Individual Agency Rethinking Periodisation—A Historical Picture of the ‘Contemporary Epoch’ Expanding Beyond Institutions and Urban Studies: Embracing a Broader Topology of Spaces Rethinking Globalisation and East/West Dichotomy Intervening Existing Knowledge in Sociology and Art History What Does the Future Hold? Reference

Index

ix

98 99 104 108 112 113 115 117 122 126 133 135 137 138 140 141 143 146 147 148 149

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

I first heard the term ‘contemporary Chinese art’ when I was an undergraduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1990s. My fascination with the topic was initially sparked by the 1999 University of Chicago exhibition Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century. Curated by Wu Hung, Transience was one of the earliest comprehensive exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art. During that time, Chinese and other Asian artists were vastly underrepresented in contemporary art exhibitions in the United States. I was eager to visit the exhibition because I was hoping to find something there that might resemble my own culture and affirm my ethnic origin. I did not get the impression that the exhibition had any significant sense of belonging. Instead, I felt a great deal of emotional distance, more than any other exhibition I had visited in the United States at the time. Apart from not being able to pronounce half of the Pinyin transliteration for the artists’ names, I had never heard of any of the artists who were featured in the exhibition. As a Chinese person born in Hong Kong, the term ‘contemporary Chinese art’—rather than offering me the feeling of intimacy I longed for—conveyed an unfamiliarity infused with an intricate quasi-familial feeling. After I graduated from college, my understanding of contemporary Chinese art grew through visits to international exhibitions. There was © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I. Leung, Tracing Contemporary Chinese Art, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2668-8_1

1

2

I. LEUNG

Alors, la Chine at the Centre Pompidou when I visited Paris in 2003, followed by Follow Me: Chinese Art at the Threshold of the New Millennium at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2005. Apart from learning about contemporary Chinese art through exhibitions abroad, there were times when I read newspapers reporting the record-high prices contemporary Chinese artists set in auction houses. After moving back to Hong Kong, I was frequently introduced to a renowned art dealer and collector who specialised in contemporary Chinese art. While Hong Kong had been put on the global art map interlinking China and the West, the city’s grand narratives as an entrepôt were still being told. My ambivalent identity as a Hong Kong Chinese has created a burgeoning interest in me to know more about China and contemporary Chinese art. Back in 2009, I decided to immerse myself in the Chinese art world as a researcher, artist and curator in an effort to learn firsthand about a topic that, upon reflection, was unfamiliar. This project allowed me to access the art world in China, which is somewhat secretive and esoteric. In the last decade, I was able to study the people who live behind the scenes and gather ethnographic information in relatively enclosed communities. This book is the result of my journey, which was central to my intellectual pursuit as well as a process involving profound personal growth and an exploration of life’s meaning. This book’s unifying theme is the processual approach to contemporary Chinese art. It explores my 10-year ethnographic journey across various locations in Shanghai. To unpack the black box—contemporary Chinese art hinged on China’s Open Door Policy—the continuous economic boom and the subsequent effects of globalisation, this book examines the realisation of macro-structural processes and larger social realities in micro-interactions within the art world. Given the art world’s place in broader society, my ethnographic encounters are structured by various places that surround museums, galleries, and art districts. I constantly immersed myself in China’s art world as an observer and participant, and I met various key individuals. In this introduction, I begin by discussing the philosophical significance of writing history in the context of writing about contemporary Chinese art. Then I illustrate how ethnography plays a role in potentially establishing stories about contemporary Chinese art in opposition to the predominant narratives in the field.

1

INTRODUCTION

3

Part 1: Contemporary Chinese Art? Constructing a history of contemporary Chinese art has long been an endeavour of many critics and historians. Ever since a number of exhibitions adopted a historical survey approach in the mid-2000s,1 the history of contemporary Chinese art became a widespread issue in the art world both inside and outside China. The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) was generally posited as a temporal rupture, separating earlier movements and the rise of the 1985 New Wave Moment, which is often regarded as a new stage in Chinese art history. This appears to have been the most well-known conventional story of contemporary Chinese art. The standard narrative of contemporary Chinese art classifies Chinese art history into the modern and contemporary periods after the traditional period. One notable example of these separations can be traced back to the naming of new Chinese art (also known as avant-garde or experimental art) after the Cultural Revolution. The term ‘modern Chinese art’ (Zhongguo xiandai yishu) did not come into use until after the Cultural Revolution. The term ‘modern’ is used to describe artists and critics during the post-Mao reform as participants in a historical contingency that gave rise to modernisation. The notion of modern Chinese art was further legitimised by key art historian Lü Peng’s comprehensive study of Chinese art, titled A History of Modern Chinese Art: 1979–1989 (L¨u, 1992). According to Wu Hung, who coined the term ‘contemporary turn’, Chinese art underwent another shift during the 1990s, which was contextualised as ‘contemporary Chinese art’ (Zhongguo Dangdai yishu) most referenced (Wu 2008, p. 12). This shift was acknowledged once more in Lü’s second book, A History of Contemporary Chinese Art: 1990–1999 (2000). Chinese artists meticulously separate their works into the traditional, modern and contemporary periods to identify significant 1 Mami Kataoka’s Follow Me!: Chinese Art at the Threshold of the New Millennium (2005), which was held at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, categorises artists who are born in the late 1960s and 1970s as a new generation of artists. It aims to conduct a historical review of works produced in the 1980s and 1990s. Fei Dawei’s 85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art (2007) at UCCA in Beijing asserts that 1985 marked a turning point in the development of contemporary Chinese art history. Zhu Zhu’s Original Point: ‘Star Group’ Retrospective Exhibition (2007) at Today Art Museum frames the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s as the ‘first real art movement of the Modernism’ in China. Feng Boyi’s Hypallage: The Post-Modern Mode of Chinese Contemporary Art (2008) at OCT in Shenzhen situates 90 works of art created after 1980 into various genres in history of art (Lü and Doar 2010, p. 25).

4

I. LEUNG

temporal splits between the past and present. The assumption of a past that has been distinguished from the present and how the past has been organised as knowledge to guide its interpretation of the present modern and contemporary epochs of Chinese art is deeply rooted in the principles of historicism. In the last few decades, many books have been published that follow Wu’s historical narrative, which documents the historical development of contemporary Chinese art sequentially. Gao Minglu’s (2008) ’85 Movement—The Enlightenment of Chinese Avant-Garde identifies 1985 as a shift in Chinese art. In Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (2011), Gao divides Chinese art history into three parts: the avant-garde before 1985, the ’85 Movement and the post-’85 avant-garde. While Gao’s historical narrative rests on periodisation and stylistic analysis that are commonly seen in the existing literature, Yan Zhou’s (2021) A History of Contemporary Chinese Art: 1949 to Present takes a similar approach. By dividing the past into six parts, Zhou covers a range of eras spanning from the 17 years before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China to the age of contemporaneity after 2000 (Zhou 2021). Apart from periodising history by following styles and events, Lao Zhu and Qingsheng Zhu document exhibitions sequentially and annually in their book Introduction to Contemporary Art in China, which covers the years between 2005 and 2019 (Zhu 2022). Alongside the emergence of a new generation of artists who shared similar interests, Barbara Pollack’s (2018) Brand New Art From China: A Generation on the Rise tells the story of millennial artists. Even though she identifies the new generation of artists as a break from the preceding one, her framework aligns with the conventional historical narrative. Extending from genres like ‘political pop’ and ‘cynical realism’, which were coined by other historians, she distinguishes the art produced by millennial artists in new genres like ‘Chinese abstraction’ and ‘post-internet art’ (Pollack 2018). In recent years, numerous primary documents and pieces of literature have been collected, written about and analysed by notable curators, critics and historians. This has considerably helped to open up a wider perspective on aesthetics as well as the societal and political context of recent history. Although a sizeable body of historical knowledge about various eras of modern China has been produced in recent decades, key historians such as Lü have further questioned the methodology and development of contemporary Chinese art history as a discipline, as it is itself

1

INTRODUCTION

5

a key theoretical problem. In the introduction of A History of Art in 20th-Century China (2010)—one of the most comprehensive works on modern/contemporary Chinese art history—Lü explicitly mentions the methodological issue. He thinks the various debates about the avantgarde movement and the ‘bewildering array of terminology’ (Lü and Doar 2010, p. 25) used in historical framing have revealed a crisis in the principles of methods employed in China’s art history discipline. As a historian, he believes art history should ‘reconstruct the historical circumstances’ by exploring the foundations of description and analysis and articulating a historiographical theory (Lü and Doar 2010, p. 34). By clarifying his methods of history writing, Lü encouraged a reorientation of an approach away from the questions of style and subsequently framed his historical narrative around political, economic and social changes throughout various periods of Chinese art. Several authors have re-examined the established conventions of writing about art history. They often bypass illustrating history per time period and style. Peggy Wang, for instance, takes the artist-based case study approach and reviews the story of five artists: Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Guangyi, Sui Jianguo, Zhang Peili and Lin Tianmiao (Wang 2021). Similarly, Karen Smith covers the stories of nine artists in her book Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China (Smith and Brouwer 2008). She applies the same technique later in her book The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China (Smith et al. 2007). In Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art, Meiqin Wang uses case studies to discuss the production of contemporary Chinese art concerning urbanisation (Wang 2017). Ornella De Nigris starts with museums instead of using artists as a unit. She studies the historical outlook and organisational models of China’s art museums. In Chinese Museums: Strategies and Promotion of Contemporary Chinese Art, she covers a few case studies in Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Shanghai (Nigris 2022). In The Art of Contemporary China, Jiang Jiehong focuses on collectiveness, experimental practices, urbanisation and political limitations from the post-Mao era (Jiang 2021). These books provide narratives that move away from periodisation. They make more striking connections between exhibitions, practices, events and political developments centred on individual artists and museums. One notable book on writing the history of contemporary Chinese art is Sasha Su-Ling Welland’s Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art (2018). Rather than examining

6

I. LEUNG

the recent past through thematic analyses and case studies, she uses ethnography through a feminist lens. She uses examples from her interactions with artists, curators, officials and urban planners to analyse how gender politics are used to negotiate social positions in art. By showcasing her extensive field experiences, she provides a practical intervention and presents a more multidimensional picture of feminist art within the field of contemporary Chinese art (Welland 2018). Although her work has set the stage for a new approach, more research is still needed to fully understand the micro-history of the many aspects of contemporary Chinese art at play. Numerous studies about the local and global structures of contemporary Chinese art focus on the West. Melissa Chiu studies China’s artistic diaspora in her book Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China (2007), which features interviews with many artists who achieved fame in the West, such as Cai Guo-Qiang, Xu Bing, Wenda Gu and Zhang Huan. She conceptualises contemporary Chinese art as having ‘two worlds’ as she embraces the East–West dichotomy prevalent in existing discourse (Chiu 2007). Marie Leduc’s Dissidence: The Rise of Chinese Contemporary Art in the West studies nine artists who have challenged political values in China and contributed to the rise of contemporary Chinese art in the West (Leduc 2018). Apart from providing case studies of individual artists and scrutinising specific works in a global setting, some authors examine historical precedents established by art collectors. In Red Aside: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, Rosa Maria Malet and Martina Millà Bernard cover over 50 pieces from Sigg’s collection created between 1986 and 2006 (Malet 2008). Similarly, Pi Li’s Chinese Art Since 1970: The M+ Sigg Collection has compiled over 600 works by over 300 artists, categorised them, and divided Chinese art history into four decades in accordance with popular artistic genres (Li 2022). In his book Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (2014), Paul Gladston proposes a critical analytical framework that addresses the theoretical issues posed by the divergences between Western and indigenous Chinese perspectives. Rather than merely providing historical descriptions from documentary sources, Gladston encourages multifaceted and discursive analysis of a broader historical context. He specifically references Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance and Michel Foucault’s insights into the effects of discourse and power. Gladston argues that most existing studies ‘divide the development of Chinese art according to seismic events in recent Chinese history’ and emphasise the

1

INTRODUCTION

7

Derridean conception of ‘trace-structure’ in re-examining historical events at ‘at a granular level’ instead of ‘through simple manifestations of continuity and rupture’ (Gladston 2014, p. 37). Addressing the East–West dichotomy that has been extensively examined in earlier studies, this book considers the many sites it studies as being both bounded and expanded. I can outline my project well by starting with the questions that various authors have raised in the prior literature on contemporary Chinese art. I am particularly interested in Lü’s proposition to emphasise descriptive strategies in history writing and his demand for a rationale of historiography, as well as Gladston’s suggestions for bringing the history of contemporary Chinese art to a granular level of detail and the notions of continuity and rupture. The queries posed by the aforementioned authors encourage me to continue working on my project akin to the question of historiography.

Part 2: Historiographic Strategies In many of the extant literary works, comprehension of different political regimes has structured our understanding of contemporary Chinese art that is affected by economic transformation. Both Mao Zedong’s collectivisation and Deng Xiaoping’s Chinese economic reform had been constructed and presented as different bodies of reasoning and conceptual apparatuses that were implicitly embedded in various sources of written history before catalytically evolving into distinct stages of shifting ideology. The essence of reform and revolution lies in the logic of marking a beginning and an end to each period for political regimes to safeguard the continuity and transformations of different subject matters, chronological facts and events. Many historians share a few assumptions. The first is that objects of art are purely intentional and that both the artist and the art itself express truths. Second, many historians believe that different artistic movements necessarily contradict earlier aesthetic schemata and political beliefs. It makes sense for us to categorise art produced during Imperial China as ‘traditional’, during Mao as ‘propaganda’ and after Deng as ‘contemporary’. When one examines the history of Chinese art without considering the viable breaking points and the overarching ideological, economic and aesthetic ideals offered by the influential figures or fully accepting the rational persuasion offered by art historians that objects of art have this evolutionary status, one might begin to assess the ‘configuration of

8

I. LEUNG

thought in a given historical period’ and question the unified inner truth that lies in objects of art as well as the assumptions in the discipline of art history itself (Oksala 2005). Going back to Lü’s criticism of existing history writing of contemporary Chinese art, one of the issues with the predominant methodology of art history is that it relies on a ‘stylistic approach from the perspective of a connoisseur’ (Lü and Doar 2010, p. 13) and ignores the influence of ‘ideas, -isms, document, directives, or ideologies’ that are influenced by ‘the weighty historical events, political issues, and political figures’2 (Lü and Doar 2010, p. 34). In recent times, the domain of contemporary Chinese art has been frequently viewed via the lens of the a priori, which supports the assumption of its universal validity of grand historical events. The systems approach that sustains our interpretation of Chinese art focuses on the overall input and output within the universal ‘supersystem’ like a ‘black box’, frequently ignoring the system’s internal process or ‘sub-systems’. One cannot help but be carried away by the idea of major political figures, collectors, artists, curators and gallery owners, who are the key personnel under the view of the ‘super-system’. Knowledge of contemporary Chinese art has thus evolved as a result of a historical shift that is entangled with various social rationales and concurrently subscribes to the structural shifts of globalisation and the domestic economy. Instead of narrating the past of contemporary Chinese art based on the various ‘ideas, -isms, documents, directives, or ideologies’ as seen in many existing works of literature, this volume of essays—which is followed by this introduction—is an attempt to take the ‘micro-spatial’ approach, combining micro-history with the concept of space. I will start my inquiry here by using Heidegger’s interpretation of ‘being as lived out in the everyday’. Heidegger contends that we must clarify the ‘preontological intuition’ that exists implicitly within the business of everyday existence (Muller 2022, pp. 11, 23). My search for an alternative narrative of history that is free from the framework of aesthetic movements, 2 Lü, in his introduction writes, ‘One can see from the arrangement of this book’s “Contents” that my description accords with one hundred years of political, economic, and social change. This is because 20th-century Chinese art has a direct, undeniable relation to the political decisive influence on art of those weighty historical events, political issues, and political figures’. For Lü, the history of art in the twentieth-century unfolds under the guidance of ‘ideas’, ‘isms’, ‘document’, ‘directives’ or ‘ideologies’. Therefore, to frame the historical narrative around political, economic and social changes surrounding the objects of art is crucial in history writing (Lü and Doar 2010, p. 34).

1

INTRODUCTION

9

political regimes and historical epochs is motivated by my scepticism of the macro-artistic movements and totalising assertions that are informed by larger movements. Instead of narrating the history of contemporary Chinese art in a sequential manner or grouping different events using existing analytical concepts, different chapters in this book are structured around various places and foreground what has been ‘lived out’ there. These places encompass the history of how and where thought arises and is bound, as well as their literal geographic position.3 They are sometimes referred to as ‘locale’, ‘region’, ‘settlement’ and ‘locality’ (Ortschaft). In Being and Time, Heidegger used the term ‘topology’,4 a specific form of methodology, to see and describe ‘place’. In Heidegger’s account, topology is the study of ‘prescencing’ things objects, or those that are disclosed around a topographer within the concrete experience of the world. He used the term ‘presencing’5 to denote how various domains of objects and people are connected and located within a wider ordering (Malpas 2007, pp. 30, 262). The ‘topo’ way of thinking emphasises the ordinary everyday events6 where the extraordinary emerges. He believes

3 As Heidegger put it, ‘presencing’ is always a ‘disclosedness’ (Entdecktheit) or ‘unhiddenness’ (Unverborgenheit) of things of a specific ‘there’ (Malpas 2007, p. 17), where related existence of things is gathered, united, bound and unconcealed. He emphasises that ‘there’ is a fundamental concern that is centred in Being, in which the ‘disclosedness’ and ‘unhiddenness’ of things (truth) must be a response to what is disclosed materially in a particular place, rather than supervised or dictated by prevailed concepts and ideas. Thus, Being requires being as ‘presencing’ in ‘place’; ‘truth’ cannot be articulated by thoughts that are preoccupied, but rather, ‘truth’ made presence with the existence of things in and through particular locations. 4 In Heidegger’s term, ‘topology’ is ‘Ort Redn’, which means to speak of a place or the discourse of a place (Malpas 2007, p. 33). 5 In On Time and Being, Heidegger further elaborates the relationship between Being and ‘place’ by using the term ‘presencing’ (Heidegger 1996, p. 154). He says, ‘Ever since the beginning of Western thinking with the Greeks, all saying of “Being” and “Is” is held in remembrance of the determination of Being as presencing which is binding for thinking’ (Heidegger 1977, p. 7). He suggests that thinking must be bound by Being as ‘presensing’—the ‘happening of world’ (Malpas 2007, p. 275) in and through ‘place’. In Heidegger’s account, ‘presence’ does not imply a simple ‘standing there’ that is independent from everything else; it is ‘the happening of the world’ where different things are inevitably connected—the relatedness ‘with things in their sameness and difference and in their unity and multiplicity’ (Malpas 2007, pp. 15, 275). 6 Speaking of ‘place’, Heidegger writes about the everydayness of things that we ‘encounter’: ‘In the room stands the table at which one sits in order to write, eat, sew, play...its standing there in the room means: it plays a role for such and such a use;

10

I. LEUNG

history unfolds on a much deeper level by the narrative of human beings’ common sense and familiarity with everyday life in the world than by focusing on significant events (Heidegger 1996, p. 55). Through a reading of Heidegger’s ideas about place, the self and a deeper understanding of how things form, stories of contemporary Chinese art were centred on how spatiality shapes the very fabric of experience and knowledge in the following chapters. The stories in this book illustrate the interconnected experiences of players; they see the world as a set of relationships involving divergently with things, people and lives in and through various distinct locations. As such, I aim to pursue a way of thinking that moves away from metaphysics and focuses on the experience of everyday life to examine how the past unfolds with respect to its historical character. Apart from the common stylistic analysis used in history writing in contemporary Chinese art, Lü also identified the periodisation approach as a problem. He pointed out that many historians overlooked the ‘organic unity’ spanning the entire time period from the late Qing dynasty to the present and merely focused on the distinctions between different periods as well as their failure to place the post-1979 New Art, the 1985 New Wave and the ensuing development in a longer ‘continuum’7 across the twentieth century in China (Lü and Doar 2010, pp. 13–16). This book takes Heidegger’s understanding of temporality and Michel Foucault’s perspective on the ‘history of the present’ to reflect contestations of the periodisation approach regarding the temporal-historical axis of contemporary Chinese art. Being, according to Heidegger, can be interpreted as ‘already-being-in-a-world’ (Heidegger 1996, p. 57), which denotes the existence of things that have already occurred. Being also refers to what is happening here and now. Besides the past and the

this or that is impractical, unsuited for it...the boys have been here, and still are...this is the side at which my wife sits if she wishes to read;...we had this or that discussion at the table; here a decision was made with a friend; there a certain work written; that holiday celebrated’ (Kisiel and Van Buren 1994, p. 333). 7 He thinks that the 1980s might mark a break in the history of Chinese art; however,

many historians have failed to see the similarities between earlier and later periods of Chinese art. For example, many historians view art from 1990 onwards as a movement of cynical realism but ignored the importance of Deng Xiaoping’s economic and political reform, which strengthened the market economy and proposed a ‘liberal worldview’ after 1992.

1

INTRODUCTION

11

present, Being is also a projection (Entwurf) that draws on ‘the existential constitution of the future possibility’ (Heidegger 1996, p. 134). Within this framework, Being is in itself a ‘existential interrelatedness’ of the past, present and future (Woessner 2010, p. 82), with objects existing in the present as both ‘having-been’ (Gewesen) and projection (Entwurf) simultaneously (Malpas 2007, p. 72). Through this lens, the temporal ground of history also receives a different treatment: rather than viewing the past as a culmination of events that organically transitions to the present, it acknowledges a number of contingencies in a process interrelated to the present, past and future. Michel Foucault’s ‘history of the present’ associates the inquirer’s present with the past, much like Heidegger’s approach to time and space. Foucault’s scepticism of dominant views on time demonstrates an affinity with Heidegger’s thesis. The phrase ‘the history of the present’ questions the construction of different truth claims that have been validated by institutions and history itself. It questions the ‘epochal knowledge’ that is at the core of reading time chronologically,8 a method for examining knowledge produced within a specific period and identifying the ‘breaks’ that make events successive or simultaneous. To evoke the complex history of contemporary Chinese art and its historicity regarding a nexus of events stretching through past, present and future, the thinking on time presented in this book is structured around an existential interpretative lens in which stories are narrated in a nonlinear approach. For instance, the Rockbund Museum,9 one of China’s most significant institutions of contemporary art, once housed the Shanghai Museum10 in 1874 and, subsequently, the Preparatory Office of

8 Foucault’s articulation of his critical projects on history, in which his way of thinking has been highly influenced by Heidegger’s notion of time and space. In Foucault’s final interview before his death in 1984, he said, ‘…Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher…my entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger’ (Milchman and Rosenberg 2003, p. 3). 9 Established in 2009, Rockbund Museum is a private museum located at the last prime piece of land still available in the Bund. Since the opening of the museum, Rockbund became one of the most important contemporary art museums in China, hosting major exhibitions such as Cai Guo-Qiang: Peasant Da Vincis (2010), 2010 Zeng Fanzhi (2010) and Zhang Huan: Q Confucius (2012). 10 The Shanghai Museum is China’s second museum and, during the late Qing dynasty, it served as the most important venue for the exhibition of traditional Chinese art. It was opened by the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS) and was one of the most important outposts of the British Empire at the time.

12

I. LEUNG

History and Development of Shanghai11 in 1956. Even though traditional or modern Chinese artwork has been removed to make room for the exhibition of forward-looking contemporary pieces, the logical progression from the shifting ideologies hosted inside the same building over time makes me reflect on how foreign museums founded more than a century ago have carried forward the ability to shape knowledge, discourses and how we understand art objects today. Instead of intuitively considering the Rockbund Museum as a more advanced product of progress than before, I study how the museum as an institution relates to administrative mechanisms, which bring into play rationality and maintain the exercise of power from the past. Indeed, the trajectories of different players and the establishment of various institutions portrayed in the following chapters did not take place in a linear sequential progression. They were embedded in a dynamic process of mutual and relational setting where multiple connections crossed one other’s pathways throughout time. The present is continually recalling the past and future, creating contexts for various players and places to network as well as a multi-temporal of links that is constantly growing. By acknowledging the processual quality of the art world, this book examines how ‘contemporary Chinese art’ is created in the present but also uncovers the discursive traces of the past to rethink the value of contemporary phenomena.

Part 3: Ethnographic Journey The aforementioned way of thinking further encourages me to carve out a space for ethnographic engagement. For instance, the notion of topology, which emphasises routine spatial inquiry, is especially relevant

11 The Preparatory Office of History and Development of Shanghai is one of the key administrative departments in charge of overseeing the development of the museums after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

1

INTRODUCTION

13

to ethnomethodology.12 Critical ethnographers embrace phenomenology’s attitude of telling and interpreting everyday life experiences and how ‘ordinary human consciousness perceives its day-to-day lifeworld’ (Madison 2011, p. 70). They borrow the phenomenological lens to observe and share stories of the ‘environing world’ by showing the frequently obscured everydayness of ‘world-hood’. The essence of critical ethnography is ‘to rebuild understanding of macro-level systems from bottom up’ (Schwartzman 1993, p. 45), which gives me the opportunity to return to the field and study the ‘intimate familiarity with day-today practice and meanings of social actions’ (Brewer 2000, p. 11). The on-the-spot, ground-level approach that ethnomethodologies interrogate knowledge that is validated by habitual, commonsense, everyday microscopic events and subjectively oriented ‘micro-mechanisms’ of social institutions (Foucault 1980, p. 59). This coincides with my efforts to research the history of contemporary Chinese art that moves away from a structured and coherent ‘episteme’ and makes space for a ‘discovery-based’ inquiry (Hammersley 1992, p. 16). Since 2009, I have repeatedly immersed myself in the Chinese art world as a researcher to get first-hand experience of the environment and novel insights. Although the stories in the book may seem to cover only a short time, it took a lot of effort to build substantial relationships with local players—not only as an active observer but also as an artist and curator—to gain access to the lives of the various groups in the art world. Ethnomethodology allows me to conduct research in the relatively insular communities within the setting of the contemporary art world, which can be enigmatic, exclusive, concealed, favouring certain individuals, or characterised by specialised knowledge. Through a five-day tour sponsored by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, I travelled to Suzhou, Nanjing and Shanghai (the Yantze River Delta) in the first year (2009), where I had my first contacts with various officials and owners of state-owned/private museums and galleries. I returned to China in the summer of 2010, having spent 12 ‘Ethnomethodology is the study of the implicit, taken-for-granted rules and forms of knowledge that structure and give order to people’s everyday interactions. The subject is indicated by the provenance of the term, which signifies “the study of people’s methods”. Ethnomethodology was developed primarily by the sociologist Harold Garfinkel in the late 1960s…(which) emphasised the process by which individuals interpret and thereby constitute their social realities—primarily through conversation and direct interactions, which Garfinkel termed reflexivity’ (Calhoun 2002, pp. 149–150).

14

I. LEUNG

the previous year studying Putonghua and reviewing the many eras of Chinese art history; I spent these three months in Shanghai, Suzhou and Beijing. During that visit, in addition to spending a lot of time with different players in the art world, I conducted over 50 interviews with artists, curators, critics, art administrators, academics, collectors, gallery dealers, museum owners and real-estate developers. Aside from obtaining the primary accounts of these stakeholders, their personal histories and their positions in the Chinese art world, this experience also brought me closer to different players and gave me a ticket to access various places, including visiting artists’ lodgings and studios, snooping around galleries’ workspaces, having lunch at museum owners’ homes, drinking at the favourite cafe of dealers, previewing collectors’ private collections, travelling with curators and many other behind-the-scene experiences. In this setting, I improved my capacity to learn insider stories by mingling in groups, observing body language, asking the right questions and meticulously studying the organisation and invisible structures of different spaces. My life in China was structured by participating in and observing various domains of places that surround museums, galleries and art districts to highlight how the art world is a part of a larger society. This allowed me to cross paths with other members of society, from well-funded expatriates to migrant workers. After spending my first year in mainland China, I returned to Hong Kong and kept in touch with my acquaintances and friends in the art world through phone calls and emails. This helped pave the way for subsequent visits so that I could better understand them and keep up with the latest developments of various players. In 2011, I spent another summer in Shanghai and Beijing to revisit the many spaces I had previously studied with newer insights and assumptions to prove. In addition to formal interviews and many behind-the-scenes experiences, the visit this time allowed me to gain further access, by virtue of being an insider, to the daily working practices, tactics, struggles and politics among the dynamics of the Chinese art world. Apart from the summer visits, I also made quick trips to Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hangzhou, where I visited a number of art fairs, exhibitions, academies and artists’ studios. Even though not all events are covered in the following chapters and this book only focuses on Shanghai, the experiences I gained from my research have confirmed my understanding of the multiple contexts that underpin the complex art world. In addition to merely being a researcher, I also strengthened bonds with different players by serving as a curator for the

1

INTRODUCTION

15

exhibition ‘One World Exposition’,13 a five-year initiative that explores an array of mainland Chinese and Hong Kong artists, including artists such as Feng Mengbo, Ellen Pau, Qiu Zhijie, Jeffrey Shaw, Johnnie To, Yang Fudong, Zhang Peili, Chen Tianzhuo, Lu Yang and the like. During my summers off from teaching, I returned for a further seven years, starting in 2011. Some of the museums, galleries and art districts witnessed racial changes over time because many urban expansions in China are built on a pattern of demolishing and rebuilding to achieve economic growth. My frequent trips back to various places provide me with the opportunity to observe how the art world changes over time. Given that some of the sites no longer exist, my eyewitness accounts are a valuable source of information for readers. Such multi-level immersion of varying intensity is how my ‘rhizomic’14 discovery of the art-related lifeworld of contemporary China takes shape, grounded in an emerging topology of places. In the following chapters, this book will inevitably interact with many social locations and cultural practices that are not typically considered in the story of art. Over more than a decade of studying contemporary Chinese art, the personal and the socio-institutional have multifarious relationships that are specific to given locations and different moments.

13 One World Exposition was a month-long project that was held at a number of venues, such as the Asia Art Archive, the Hanart TZ Gallery, the KEE Club, the Osage ArtFoundation, the School of Creative Media of City University of Hong Kong and Spring Workshop. Supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and presented by Videotage, the project included a series of symposiums, exhibitions, artist talks, performances and screenings between 8 December 2011 and 8 January 2012. Participating artists in the project included Aaajiao (Xu Wenkai), Cao Fei, Henry Chu, Feng Mengbo, Linda Lai, Teddy Lo, Ou Ning, Ellen Pau, Qiu Zhijie, Jeffrey Shaw, Eric Siu, Johnnie To, Wang Jianwei, Wang Zhenfei, Wang Luming, Yang Fudong, Danny Yung and Zhang Peili. 14 Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari’s theory of the ‘rhizome’ is both a mode of knowledge and a conceptual picture of society. The rhizome theory encourages me to investigate multiple, non-hierarchical connectivities (Deleuze and Guattari 2012, p. 3). The form of knowledge resulting from this theory embraces both vertical and horizontal connections and allows trans-species connections (Deleuze and Guattari 2012, p. 328). In the following chapters, my discussion of art will inevitably interact with many social locations and cultural practices that are not normally considered in the story of art. The personal and the socio-institutional have multifarious relations specific to given locations and different moments.

16

I. LEUNG

References Brewer, John D. 2000. Ethnography. Buckingham: Open UP. Calhoun, Craig J. 2002. Dictionary of the social sciences. New York: Oxford University Press. Chiu, Melissa. 2007. Breakout: Chinese art outside China. Milano: Charta. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix. Guattari. 2012. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977 , ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon. Gao, Minglu. 2008. ’85 Movement—The enlightenment of Chinese avant garde. Guilin: Guangxi shi fan da xue chu ban she. Gao, Minglu. 2011. Total modernity and the avant-garde in twentieth-century Chinese art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gladston, Paul. 2014. Contemporary Chinese Art: A critical history. London: Reaktion Books. Hammersley, Martyn. 1992. What’s wrong with ethnography?: Methodological explorations. London: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. Time and being (Essay). In On time and being, 7. New York: Harper & Row. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Jiang, Jiehong. 2021. The art of contemporary China. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd. Kisiel, Theodore J., and John Van Buren. 1994. Reading Heidegger from the start: Essays in his earliest thought. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Leduc, Marie. 2018. Dissidence: The rise of Chinese Contemporary Art in the West. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Li, Pi. 2022. Chinese art since 1970: The M+ Sigg collection. Thames & Hudson. Lü, Peng, and Bruce G. Doar. 2010. A history of art in 20th-century China. Milano: Charta. Lü, Peng, and Dan Yi. 1992. A history of Modern Chinese art: 1979–1989. Changsha: Hunan Meishu Chubanshe. Madison, D. Soyini. 2011. Critical ethnography: Method, ethics, and performance. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Malet, Rosa Maria. 2008. Red aside: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg collection. Barcelona: Fundació Joan Miró. Malpas, Jeff. 2007. Heidegger’s topology: Being, place, world. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Milchman, Alan, and Alan Rosenberg. 2003. Toward a Foucault/Heideggar Ausseinandersetzung (Essay). In Foucault and Heidegger: Critical encounters, 3. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

1

INTRODUCTION

17

Muller, Robin M. 2022. ‘We are ourselves the entities to be analysed’: Heidegger on being human (Essay). In The Routledge companion to humanism and literature, ed. Michael Bryson, 11. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Nigris, De Ornella. 2022. Chinese museums: Strategies and promotion of Contemporary Chinese Art. Milan: Mimesis International. Oksala, Johanna. 2005. Philosophical laughter (Essay). In Foucault on freedom, 21. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pollack, Barbara. 2018. Brand new art from China: A generation on the rise. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., Ltd. Schwartzman, Helen B. 1993. Ethnography in organizations. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Smith, Karen, and Marianne Brouwer. 2008. Nine lives: The birth of avant-garde art in new China. New York: AW Asia. Smith, Karen, Simon Groom, and Zhen Xu. 2007. The real thing: Contemporary art from China. Liverpool: Tate Liverpool. Wang, Peggy. 2021. The future history of Contemporary Chinese Art. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wang, Meiqin. 2017. Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art. Taylor & Francis. Welland, Sasha Su-Ling. 2018. Experimental Beijing: Gender and globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art. Durham, UK: Duke University Press. Woessner, Martin. 2010. Heidegger in America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wu, Hung. 2008. Ruins, fragments, and the Chinese modern and postmodern (Essay). In Making history: Wu Hung on Contemporary Art, 12. Hong Kong: Timezone 8. Zhou, Yan. 2021. History of contemporary Chinese Art: 1949 to present. Singapore: Springer. Zhu, Lao, ed. 2022. Introduction to contemporary art in China. Andover, UK: Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

Rockbund Art Museum—A Museum’s History of the Present

This book begins with the history of the Rockbund Art Museum. The museum was established in 2009 and is situated on the last available piece of prime land in the Bund. The building housed the Shanghai Museum (The North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society) in 1874 and served as a critical administrative office that oversaw the development of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) museum after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The museum has become a prominent contemporary art exhibition venue in recent years. During the late Qing dynasty, the Shanghai Museum was established by the British and was the most influential place for academic exchange, public exhibition and education. Forward-looking contemporary works have now replaced Chinese art and natural specimens from the past. However, the formative effects and shifting ideologies hosted inside the building prompted me to consider how foreign museums founded over a century ago continue to advance knowledge, discourses and disciplinary power. This chapter has three parts. Part 1 provides the context of the museum by summarising the history of the Shanghai Museum in the late Qing dynasty. Part 2 draws on my interview with Lai Hsiangling, the first director of the museum, as well as my first field visit to the museum when it was newly established in 2010. Part 3 presents stories of my recurrent visits to the museum and my recent encounters with the museum’s staff. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I. Leung, Tracing Contemporary Chinese Art, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2668-8_2

19

20

I. LEUNG

This chapter concludes by describing how the museum belongs to the model of private, non-enterprise institutions, showing the coexistence of top-down mandates and bottom-up initiatives where broader social structure and personal pursuits converge. Drawing on extensive sources of materials gathered since 2010, this chapter analyses how a private museum has retained its disciplinary power from the past, which can be traced back to the late Qing dynasty. It offers insights into how China employs contemporary art as part of a larger strategy to facilitate its soft power.

Part 1: Historical Context of the Shanghai Museum in the Late Qing Dynasty Before the first museum was established in China, art and artefacts were collected by various institutions during the Kaifeng and imperial periods, including the ‘house’1 ( fu) and ‘court’2 (ge). Objects were classified based on their structural differences. Within the imperial system, the house and court conferred the status of objects and created discourses of art. They are considered the earliest institutional forms in which princely objects were organised (Li 2000, p. 11). According to various museological sources,3 the concept of a museum had been brought to China before the first foreign museums were established, during which a large amount of Western literature concerning museums was translated by local elites. The term ‘museum’ first appeared in 1848 in geographer Xu Jiyu’s A Short Account of the Maritime Circuit (Wang 2001, p. 72). After Xu introduced the museum concept, the term bowuguan (house of extensive

1 According to The Rites of Zhou, collected items, such as sacrificial vessels, weapons, jade and gold, were stored in the Sky House, Jade House and Inner House (Li 2000, pp. 11–12). The ‘house’ was one of the earliest institutions to systematically identify collections. 2 Tianlu Court, Shiqu Court and Kirin Court were established in the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD). The repository of the ‘court’ was both a physical space to store art objects and an agent within the imperial system. 3 One of China’s most comprehensive museum histories is recorded in the Basis of Chinese Museology, published by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage.

2

ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM—A MUSEUM’S HISTORY …

21

things)4 appeared in Lin Zexu’s Gazetteer of the four continents 5 in 1836 (Zhu 2005, p. 212). The foreign museum’s physical setting offered local elites a first-hand experience of a museum’s architectural design, display techniques and management. The establishment of these museums also provided a framework for the subsequent reform of various policies. Systemised public art displays did not emerge until the inauguration of Museum Heude.6 The birth of the museum offered new opportunities for the imperial court’s treasures to be accessible to citizens. Known as the first museum established in China, Museum Heude was opened by French Jesuit missionary and zoologist Pierre Marie Heude in 1868 (Wang 2001, p. 94). Soon after, the Shanghai Museum was opened by the Royal Asiatic Society of the United Kingdom in 1874. The museum building consisted of two floors with Western-style decorations, which housed a library, a display hall and an auditorium. Inside the display hall, collected objects were mounted separately with detailed descriptions and indicative values. The museum was originally dedicated to collecting objects, artefacts and specimens from the natural world of China and Japan, and preserved plants and animals were used to represent the developmental stages of humanity. Later, the museum included collections from the imperial court. As princely objects were relocated from the private arena for public display, the general public was presented with knowledge of natural history and Chinese culture, and the Chinese elites were inspired by the formative effect, technique, equipment and rationale of these foreign museums. Soon after the CCP consolidated its power, the Preparatory Office of History and Development of Shanghai was founded at the museum’s original site in 1956. The site was subsequently transformed into a critical administrative office that oversaw the development of the museums after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, which laid the foundation for China’s unique style of museum management. The foreign museums in China during the late Qing dynasty provided grounds for the inception and transformation of new knowledge. Not only were certain objects 4 Lin described the British Museum as ‘Buliedian bowuguan’. It was believed that the Japanese scholar Fukuzawa Yukichi first translated the term bowuguan in the nineteenth century. The term bowuyuan was later mentioned in Wang Tao’s The Expressions of Self (Zhu 2005, pp. 214–215). 5 This title is a translation from Hugh Murray’s An Encyclopedia of Geography (1834). 6 Museum Heude was renamed the Museum of Natural History in 1883.

22

I. LEUNG

deployed as precious objects on display, but these museums’ display techniques and their distinct organisation of space and time offered a new way of ‘civic seeing’ that has continued to the present time (Varutti 2014).

Part 2: Establishment of the Rockbund Art Museum The story of Shanghai never stopped—traces of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan past can still be observed everywhere in the Bund. While the city has transformed into a modern metropolis, many distinctive historical buildings have been retained. Despite no longer serving their original purposes, the buildings have been renewed with new functions to meet the current agenda of Shanghai. The former Shanghai Museum building and the surrounding colonial-era buildings are perfect examples. Established in 2009, Rockbund Art Museum is a prominent contemporary art exhibition venue in Shanghai. I first visited the museum in 2010, when it was newly established. At that time, China witnessed miraculous economic growth, especially when the country was in the spotlight while hosting global mega-events like the 2008 Olympic Games and World Expo 2010. Whenever I visited Shanghai in the following years, vivid memories of that time in China always returned—it was a cosmopolitan dreamworld of the future with great optimism and a promise of unquestionable prosperity. ‘Better City, Better Life’—Surreal Reality of the Newly Renovated Bund Located on the last available piece of prime land in the Bund, the museum area was ready to greet the World Expo 2010. Every street corner displayed garish advertising billboards promoting a ‘Better City, Better Life’, a slogan chosen for the World Expo that articulated China’s dream of future urban modernity. While wandering along the waterfront, I recalled a moment when I was on the same streets three years ago—my feeling towards the Bund was utterly different. Back then, the long waterfront was under construction, and views of the grand buildings along the Bund and the skyscrapers on the east side of Huangpu River were covered by massive construction fences. Many buildings looked somewhat decayed as if left vacant for decades. In front of the construction sites, the streets were lined with street food, pirated DVDs and counterfeit watches sold

2

ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM—A MUSEUM’S HISTORY …

23

by hawkers. They were accompanied by para-police ‘chengguan’ officers responsible for clearing the streets. For a moment, I felt deeply disappointed with Shanghai: it had not met my expectations of the legendary Bund. Within three years, the city had met Beijing’s desire to impress foreign and domestic spectators. From the massive investment in infrastructure to keeping the streets clean, the Bund in 2010 revealed a changing sensibility. As if by magic, the dilapidated construction site was replaced with streets dotted with flowers and European-style street lights. There were no hawkers and portable stalls on the streets; instead, one could find international franchises, such as Costa Coffee and Häagen-Dazs. The buildings that once housed the offices of foreign trading houses and banks were replaced by luxury shops, where signage for Rolex and Dolce & Gabbana was spelt out across buildings’ facades. During the height of World Expo 2010, one could easily find long queues outside each of these buildings. The Bund displayed China’s re-emergence as an economic power, signalling a return to Shanghai’s prosperous and triumphant days in the early twentieth century. Within a few minutes walk along the promenade, I found myself at the Rockbund project, a massive real-estate initiative located at the northern part of the Bund that involves revitalising a series of colonial architecture from between 1897 and 1932. The Chinese name for Rockbund, Waitanyuan, meaning ‘the origin of the Bund’, explains the developer’s agenda: to carry Shanghai from its profound history of economic and cultural prosperity to a trendy neighbourhood with an architectural heritage flavour. Conceived as a collaborative endeavour between the city and foreign investors, the real-estate project planned to preserve and revamp 42,000 square metres of old buildings and create six new buildings on the surrounding 52,000 square metres of unused land (Willis 2022). On Zhongshan Road East, a silent street at the northernmost end of the Bund, one could find a tree-lined street that was first built by British settlers in 1843. It is where the building of the former Shanghai Museum was located. Since 2006, David Chipperfield Architects, an English architecture firm known for museum construction and restoration, took over the master plan to restore and convert many of the historical buildings. On Yuanmingyuan Road, one could find the National Industrial Bank Building, which once housed one of the four major issuing banks during the rule of Kuomintang. Buildings such as the Yuan Ming Yuan

24

I. LEUNG

Apartments,7 the Amipre & Co. Building,8 the Y.W.C.A. Building9 and the Somekh Apartment Building10 were being transformed into luxury retail shops, spas and restaurants. The buildings of the former printing company China Baptist Publication & Christian Literature, the American and British church Associate Mission Building and the theatre and school Lyceum Building were undergoing preservation for future private clubs and office towers. In 2010, the newly opened neighbourhood seemed dead, as many old buildings looked abandoned. The one exception was the Peninsula Hotel, the first new building erected on the Bund. The hotel is owned by a wealthy Hong Kong-based Jewish family who owned a merger of a Shanghai and a Hong Kong company back in 1922 (The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels 2022). The hotel selection is not random; it comes with a historic lineage between Shanghai and Hong Kong that can be traced back to the early twentieth century. While much of the Hong Kong business and social elite were from Shanghai, the returning home of the famous hotel to Shanghai is a symbolic statement that Shanghai has regained its status as an economic centre. Opposite the hotel, guards stood at the entrance of every historical building. They stared straight ahead with no interest in anyone passing by. These guards are accompanied by half-naked workmen crawling around building skeletons, contrasting sharply with the hotel dwellers. Despite the dreary restoration work that was taking place in the neighbourhood, one could also find couples in wedding gowns and tuxedos taking pictures in front of the heritage buildings. The apparent incompatibility of things—heritage buildings, a brand-new luxury hotel, security guards, workers and couples, from all times and purposes, cramped into one single place—proves the surreal reality of contemporary urban life in China. In China, propaganda slogans in white characters on red backgrounds can be found everywhere. Despite the advertising slogans of the trendy real-estate project appearing in a different style, they served 7 The Yuan Ming Yuan Apartments was the office of the biggest foreign firm opened by the Germans. 8 The Amipre & Co. Building was the former Panamanian Embassy. 9 The Y.W.C.A. Building was the former meeting place for the Chinese Young Women’s

Christian Association. 10 The Somekh Apartment Building was the office of Wenweibao and Xinhua News Agency.

2

ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM—A MUSEUM’S HISTORY …

25

a similar purpose—portraying an example to follow or projecting a better future. Various slogans—such as ‘Reborn—Rebirth of the uncompromising beauty’, ‘Art—Art is a spirit’, ‘Fashion—Establish your own scene’ and ‘Classic—Classic memory of a century’—that project an image where past meets future were vividly mounted on various buildings. They aimed to tell visitors that the site will soon become an arty neighbourhood that mixes traditional cultural taste with an avant-garde attitude. Former Director—Adopting the Non-Delineated Rules of the Game A week after I arrived in Shanghai in the summer of 2010, I got a chance to meet the senior management of the Rockbund Art Museum. At 11 a.m. on 25 August, I found myself at the Shahmoon Building. Built-in 1928, the building was previously the Capitol Theatre, and it had housed the headquarters of major Hollywood studios such as United Artists, Columbia Films, Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount Films. In 2009, the building was transformed into the headquarters of the Rockbund project. The movie posters in the former movie theatre lobby were replaced by 3D animations and a scale model of the planned real-estate project, making me feel like I was entering a real-estate trade show. After signing in at reception, I walked up a marble staircase decorated with iron railings. Framed black and white photos of the Bund during the nineteenth century hung on the walls beside the staircase of each floor. In a minute, I was greeted by my friend Ella Liao, who used to work at MoCA Shanghai, one of the earliest contemporary art museums in Shanghai. The museum office on the third floor was a room configured with two rows of desks facing each other. Liao offered me tea and introduced me to her colleagues one by one, which included the assistant curators, the graphic designers and the marketing and education correspondents—seven people in total. They all looked like the typical, smart art professionals who were enthusiastic about pursuing a museum career. Within minutes, Liao’s phone rang. I had barely had time to sip my tea before I was taken to the office of Lai Hsiangling, the museum director. Sitting next to a big window with a good view of the Waibaidu Bridge and the former art deco landmark Broadway Mansions, Lai was an elegantly dressed middle-aged woman who looked exceptionally sincere. She was originally from Taiwan. After completing her bachelor’s degree in art history at the University of Kansas, she studied museology further at George Washington University. Lai has extensive experience in curating

26

I. LEUNG

and managing public and private foundations. Before accepting the position at the Rockbund Art Museum, she directed MoCA Taipei and the Department of Cultural Affairs in Taiwan. With a Taiwanese accent, Lai recounted: I had little experience in China except that I represented MoCA Taipei in Shanghai in several forums organised by the Chinese Ministry of Culture. I came to Shanghai mainly because of my family; my husband has worked here for many years. Originally, I wanted a career break in Shanghai after resigning from my position at MoCA Taipei, so I had not expected to work here before I was contacted by the Rockbund in 2008.

As Wu (2015, para. 1) described in Ran Dian, a Hong Kong-based art magazine focusing on contemporary Chinese art, Lai’s goals were to ‘spread humanistic values, and promote art’ while creating a brandnew ‘living art space’ for the Shanghai community. The vision to build a platform that was more entrenched in the community and civic needs could have been considered quite forward-looking for a private museum in China. Despite Lai’s passion and enthusiasm, the cultural difference she faced was somewhat confrontational for an expatriate who had just started to adapt to her new job. Within minutes of her telling me about her background, she jumped to explain the core issues she was facing in Shanghai: Museum ‘with Chinese characteristics’ seems to be a common discourse here. I sometimes wonder what ‘Chinese characteristics’ mean. One thing I was certain of was that the full application of the Western museum management model would face great challenges here. I think museums in different cities should reflect the local societal reality and present the essence of the times. Regardless, there are core values a museum should embrace. In addition, China’s policy towards NGOs [non-government organisations] needs more clarity.

In China, the rules for implementing non-government organisations are ambiguous. In the West, private non-profit museums are usually supported financially by foundations. The operating costs of the Rockbund Art Museum were funded by Shanghai Bund de Rockefeller Group Master Development Company Limited, a joint venture of a municipal government’s company (New Huangpu), a New York-based property development arm of Mitsubishi (Rockefeller Group) and a Hong Kong

2

ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM—A MUSEUM’S HISTORY …

27

real-estate company (Sinolink Worldwide). Even though the city was closely linked with the entire real-estate project, the museum did not receive any public funding except ticketing, which only supported a small part of the operational costs. Lai explained: Our museum serves as an independent and non-profit art institution which is also a significant cultural construction amidst the internationally joint ventured urban development project. As the museum is situated in an area full of history, taking charge of a museum with a wider cultural and historical role is exciting. It’s a challenging job for us to uphold the independence and demonstrate cultural excellence over commercial value.

In recent years, the legal status of non-profit private museums has started to be recognised. The Today Art Museum11 in Beijing and True Color Museum in Suzhou were the only museums granted non-profit status back in 2010. In recent years, a flood of money into the art market led to a rapid increase in private art museums, though many closed their doors within a few years of opening. Many museums are registered as private companies, and insuring a museum’s assets and protecting the institution against loss have become essential for maintaining sustainable resources for the museum’s operation. This situation was described by Lai: I would say Shanghai is an investment-oriented society with high economic buoyancy. While mayors in most cities in China are appointed for a limited term of five years, it makes sense for them to expect visible economic and social establishments during their term. Nevertheless, in recent years, China has developed new laws and policies to promote arts and culture, though many still lack detail. The pressing issue is how to enforce these laws and to implement the policy in a practical manner.

Amid World Expo 2010, Yuanmingyuan Road’s heritage buildings remained largely deserted. The early launch of the museum was evidently the city’s strategy to bolster the cultural profile of the city during the high-profile international event. In recent years, commentary on museum 11 Today Art Museum is a privately owned art museum in Beijing. It was founded in 2002 by Zhang Baoquan, the president of the Anteus Corporation (a commodities brokerage firm) who was ranked 242 for the Forbes ‘The 400 Richest Chinese’ in 2011. The museum is part of a real-estate project owned by Zhang.

28

I. LEUNG

founders’ fading commitment is well-known. At a time when museums in China were receiving criticism on their accountability and ethics, Lai thought that the notion of professionalism in China was more relative than absolute. Despite the odds, Lai wanted to bring an international perspective to the museum, balancing her professional experiences with her current situation, where institutional norms were still being defined. For Lai, her past experiences demanded a working principle that reflected a high standard of duty, embracing the value of promoting the public good rather than increasing an individual’s financial gain. When she began at the Rockbund Art Museum, Lai had to reorient her thinking for this new environment. As the director of the museum, she strived to navigate a complex web of stakeholders, including different levels of administrative bodies, foreign corporations, the Shanghai art world and the general public, all while trying to keep her ideal of creating a non-profit and professional art institution. At the end of my conversation with Lai, she expressed her hopes and doubts: The negotiation power of a private museum is quite limited. We are so small, and I don’t think we can participate in the policy-making process. After all, everything in this county is under a large bureaucratic system. It is really hard to change.

Inaugural Exhibition and Lai Suddenly Stepping Down A day before my meeting with Lai, I visited the Rockbund Art Museum. It was 3 p.m. when I arrived by taxi at the museum on Huqiu Road. In front of the newly refurbished historical building, one could clearly see in huge text ‘Cai Guoqiang: Peasant Da Vincis’ painted on the museum’s wall, together with a big poster showing 10 rural villagers carrying their homemade flying machines. Along the somewhat hidden small street, the museum building was surrounded by semi-damaged colonial-era apartment buildings, and obvious imitations had been built alongside the originals. In front of a shanty car repair shop and a few local eateries, migrant workers squatted side by side, playing cards or engaging in conversations. The street stirred with the movement of bicycles, tricycles and scooters, quite typical of an ordinary Shanghai street. On the site next to the museum, construction workers were fixing pipes where water was streaming across the street.

2

ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM—A MUSEUM’S HISTORY …

29

Rockbund Art Museum stood out from the rest of the street. The building facade had been carefully restored. The yin and yang-shaped windows on either side of the iron entry door were kept unchanged. Beneath the windows were marble plaques with the museum’s logo, designed by Hong Kong-based graphic designer Alan Chan. Inside, the lobby was modern and slick, a big contrast to the facade that looked frozen in time. The six storeys of the art deco edifice were connected by a staircase with a beige marble floor and black metal railings, and floor-to-ceiling, steel-framed windows were fitted on each floor. There was a large exhibition space on the first and second floor, and the upper floors were linked through a new atrium where installation works hung from the ceiling. Unlike the typical museum, where the exhibition space is usually enveloped by bare white walls, this exhibition space was filled with windows built a century ago that allowed plenty of sunlight to filter onto the exhibited works. Standing in front of these windows, I recalled an article I had read a few days before visiting the museum. In the article, scholar Tai Li-chuan included a picture from the Smithsonian Institution Archives. It showed the Shanghai Museum in 1933, where rows of well-ordered cabinets holding natural specimens were lined neatly along these same windows (Tai 2021). The picture was vivid in my mind. For a moment, I felt like I was travelling through time, moving between the past and the present. The cabinets and animal specimens of the museum were now replaced by a wrecked aircraft. Called Cheng Nian No. 3, the artefact was created by Shantong peasant Tan Chengian, who died on impact when his invention crashed into a backyard in Ruan in 2007. One would expect to find Cai’s signature gunpowder and fireworks in his solo exhibition; instead, the exhibition was filled with the inventions of peasants from all over China. On the second floor, each peasant inventor’s name, birthplace and title were presented in inscribed ink on different walls. In the middle of the hall, more than fifty kites swayed in the artificial breeze while stories of each peasant’s inventions were projected onto the surface of each kite. The third floor featured Wu Yulu’s installations, which referenced a handful of modern and contemporary art movements, including Yves Klein jumping off a wall, Damien Hirst’s spot painting, Joseph Beuys 1965 photograph of him hugging a coyote and Jackson Pollock’s drip painting. Suspended in the atrium across different floors was Hubei peasant Li Yuming’s submarines, alongside helicopters, flying saucers and aeroplanes invented by other peasants. Grass lawns, flowers and live

30

I. LEUNG

flying birds were included as part of the installation. While the Shanghai Museum used to collect specimens of birds, exhibiting live birds flying in the same space neatly juxtaposed the past and the present. In my visits to the museum during the summer, I only saw a handful of visitors at the gallery. On most occasions, visitors hung around at the cafe on the sixth floor. The cafe housed a long sofa, coffee tables and bamboo chairs that fit neatly in the corridor space where customers could watch the suspended aircraft and flying birds through the big windows. Adorning the walls of the cafe were illustrations of the historical building and TV screens that displayed abstract video art. Besides the easily identified black-garbed art practitioners, fashion-conscious customers were enjoying the thrill of holding their Illy coffee mug in the artsy cafe. The cafe opened onto an outdoor terrace where one could see the Huangpu River and the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, where a young couple was taking a photo of themselves. At the exhibition opening night in May 2010, Cai said: Anxiety is present in Chinese society over its state of transition between ‘made in China’ and ‘created in China’, and it is the hundreds of millions of peasants who have paid the price for the construction of modern society and better urban life in the reform era. The slogan of the Shanghai Expo is ‘Better City, Better Life’, and to this I would add: ‘Peasants - Making a better city, better life’. (Chin 2010)

While World Expo 2010 was actively promoting the pursuit of a better life built on the foundation of urban development, the exhibition ironically considered the account of peasants, who are often neglected in China’s rapid economic growth. Cai questioned whether urbanisation was the only answer to improve people’s lives. He juxtaposed the massive, positive World Expo 2010 slogans on the buildings surrounding the museum with slogans such as ‘Never learned how to land’ and ‘What’s important isn’t whether you can fly’ on the museum’s facade. From the exhibition showcasing peasants’ failed experiments to the mural slogans, Cai reminded audiences about the increasing marginalisation of ordinary people at the cost of creating a ‘better city’. In an exhibition intended to highlight the social issues and challenges brought by rapid modernisation, the exhibition saw art’s underlining subversive potential yet was inevitably trapped in the microcosm of

2

ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM—A MUSEUM’S HISTORY …

31

reality. Despite Cai questioning China’s urban development, the museum’s site was undeniably a result of an organised construction of spaces that largely benefited the middle class and developers. Locally run shops and their replacement with multi-storey museums gave many ordinary people a sense of prohibition rather than invitation; an implicit yet unspoken barrier was greatly felt in this newly developed area. The newly aestheticised public space enhanced the contemporary references to social issues through Cai’s artwork. Yet, contemporary art also became the very instrument to justify the conflicts brought by urbanisation. The strategy of contemporary art rightfully obscured the problems created by urbanisation. Can a museum replacing bird and animal specimens with peasant-made machines articulate such a contradiction? Perhaps it was too early to answer at that stage. Between August and December 2010, after Cai’s exhibition, the museum presented blue-chip artist Zeng Fanzhi’s solo exhibition, followed by a group exhibition, By Day By Night, curated by notable curator Hou Hanru. On December 31, a few days after sending electronic Christmas cards that featured a photograph of the museum’s lobby lit by flurries of silver snowflakes, the museum announced, ‘to improve the protection of the building … the museum building will be temporarily closed for the optimisation of the repair project’. Immediately after, the museum was shut down for half a year in 2011. Coincidently, right before the renovation notice, a newsletter posted on the museum’s official website announced Lai’s resignation. Given that many planned projects on Yuanmingyuan Road were repeatedly postponed, rumours in the art world suggested that the museum’s opening during the World Expo 2010 was merely a strategy to brand Shanghai for international and domestic audiences. The museum reopened in October 2011, although the art world has since been sceptical about the motives and credibility of the project. The facts surrounding the sudden closure of the museum were known only to those involved in the decision-making processes. The incident reflected the practices of China’s private museums, which were not necessarily structured around the standards common in the international scene.

32

I. LEUNG

Part 3: The Museum’s Transformation I stayed in Shanghai for a few months during the summer of 2010 and returned during summer breaks from teaching for seven more years. Over the years, the art world changed a lot—so, too, did the city. I visited Shanghai for the ninth time in the summer of 2018. Standing in the same place in the Bund where I had stood when I first visited the city, I saw more high-rise buildings being erected on the Pudong side. Despite the city’s fame for knocking down buildings and putting up new projects, the Rockbund Art Museum still stood neatly on Huqiu Road. The empty historical buildings that surrounded the museum were gradually filled with fancy restaurants and shops. In front of these landmarks, security guards and couples taking wedding pictures remained abundant, although hipsters and fashionable shoppers had replaced the workmen crawling around building skeletons. Searching for New Directions and Financial Security I visited the museum again a week after I landed in Shanghai. I got a chance to meet Ramen Hsieh, the current senior curator of the museum. Originally from Taiwan, Hsieh followed Lai to Shanghai and began working as a curatorial assistant at the museum in 2009. As he had witnessed the museum’s transition throughout the years, I wondered what his experience was like working in the museum at the beginning and what had changed since Lai’s departure. We met at the museum’s coffee shop, and Hsieh told me that being the museum’s curatorial assistant was his first job. At that time, he saw Shanghai rapidly changing, and the potential for business development was greater than he had observed in Taiwan. The heated contemporary Chinese art market was also an initial impetus that led him to move to Shanghai. Hsieh recalled: When I was in college studying art, I was introduced to different art movements. I felt like I was quite naive at the time. When I started working in Shanghai, I realised the reality was quite different from what I had learned in college. No one had taught me about the things surrounding art. Being in Shanghai and participating in the construction of the museum made me realise that art is so embedded in the material environment, such as a broader social structure.

2

ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM—A MUSEUM’S HISTORY …

33

Like Lai, Hsieh gained much on-the-ground knowledge since moving to Shanghai. Both immediately realised that curating an exhibition is not merely about a concept on paper but a practice that creates. Hsieh told me that the museum faced many challenges in the first few years. In 2018, the museum’s management team wondered about the direction of the newly established institution. Given the tangible and physical settings within and surrounding the museum, they had faced struggles concerning the museum’s position within the unique power structure. Before Lai stepped down from her director position, the museum mainly presented solo exhibitions of established Chinese artists, including Cai Guoqiang and Zeng Fanzhi, and group exhibitions curated by influential figures like Hou Hanru. Over the years, the range of arts presented has become more diverse. The museum team has been contemplating the evolving role of museums in the recent landscape. As Hsieh gradually assumed a more active role in the curatorial direction in recent years, he also contributed to making some changes: I have been thinking a lot about shifting the museum to a more diverse space instead of a museum as merely a depository of important objects. And Ugo Rondinone’s 2014 exhibition presented by the museum inspired me a lot. It was enlightening for me to see how the artist utilised the museum’s space in a performative manner. I really like Rondinone’s idea of ‘live performance exhibition’. Instead of showing inanimate objects, an exhibition can be also in between visual art, performance, dance, sound and many other art forms. Later in 2016, we initiated a project called RAM Highlight. Rather than considering it as a festival, we imagine our museum as an undefined space that is fluid, open and flexible.

Instead of merely presenting top-selling Chinese artists, the museum has been presenting both established and emerging foreign and local artists. Many of the exhibitions reflect the museum’s positioning and the surrounding environments, challenging conventional ways of museum display and embracing the exhibition as a performative space. One of the exhibitions in 2012, Time Traveler, was particularly thoughtful in reflecting on the past to illuminate the present. Curated by Ella Liao, the exhibition attempted to evoke a sense of space in the Shanghai Museum of the past and reflect on the transformations of discourse and practice that occurred on the museum site over time. I visited the exhibition several times during my stay in Shanghai and particularly liked Liu Jianhua’s Blank Paper. It was presented as a series

34

I. LEUNG

of blank papers hanging on the exhibition room wall, and the piece prompted historical reflection by the audience. According to Liu, Blank Paper aims to re-awaken the audience’s perception of time and space. The nothingness of the piece is, perhaps, the reason for the existence of museum objects. While the scientific and artistic frames used to present the natural specimens and ancient Chinese art have now been replaced by perceptually innovative rational frameworks, the power of the museum’s display has always been protected. Over time, exhibitions in this museum building continue to offer visual and cultural experiences for the public, creating different senses that fit into distinct moments in time. The objects and discourses surrounding them have changed; the only thing that has not changed is the museum’s capability to exercise power and shape knowledge. In the curatorial statement, Liao said: The museum is a time machine and people who visit one become timetravelers … We still need to observe and explore how museums transmit values and systems of knowledge under different political regimes, what their new roles and social responsibilities are, and the oppositional collaboration between museums and contemporary art. (Asia Art Archive 2017, para. 4)

One might wonder what ‘values and systems of knowledge’ are being shaped under the current time. Museum audiences are always time travellers, not only in this specific exhibition, but encapsulated by the magic of what the museum has to offer. The direction of reconsidering the museum as a more diverse space has proven successful. Over the years, Rockbund Art Museum has grown from fewer than 100 visitors per day in 2019 to over 300. Every year, the museum attracts more than 70,000 visitors. In terms of demographic, most visitors to the museum fall into the ever-growing category of the middle class, followed by students, hipsters and tourists. Visitors 10 years ago mostly treated the museum as a tourist attraction. However, after establishing different commercial art spaces, the museum has attracted more serious art lovers in recent years. Commercial galleries—such as the Perrotin art gallery founded in Paris; the Bank, opened by notable curator Mathieu Borysevicz and auction houses, such as Christie’s at the iconic building known as ‘the first mansion’ on the Bund—have created a multiplier effect of arts-based development in the neighbourhood.

2

ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM—A MUSEUM’S HISTORY …

35

When the museum was first established in 2010, the operating cost of the museum was covered by companies from Hong Kong and New York. Like many foreign firms struggling to survive, the New York company withdrew its investment later on. Apart from being funded by real-estate developer, the museum has also gained support from private foundations and patrons, including the New Century Art Foundation, a non-profit art organisation approved by the Beijing Civil Affairs Bureau. Founded by collector Wang Bing, the foundation has funded more than a dozen research and publication projects, three art galleries and seven non-profit spaces. In China, it has become increasingly popular for wealthy patrons to donate money to museums. In addition to gaining social recognition and attention, these donors receive tax breaks. Furthermore, the museum has also collaborated with corporations like Hugo Boss. As a result, diversifying income sources has become critical to the museum’s sustainability. Operation Manager and Media Relation Officer—Seizing Chances to Leverage the Real-Estate Project and Social Media A few days after I met with Hsieh, I got a chance to speak with Vivian Li, the operation manager of the museum. Having majored in tourism management during college, Li previously worked in the hospitality industry. Eight years ago, Li started as a volunteer at the museum and witnessed the changes in the internal operation and curatorial directions. Li thought that the museum’s surrounding commercial services played an important role in bringing larger audiences to the museum. Throughout the years, the empty heritage buildings have been transformed into highend retail stores, upscale restaurants and luxury commercial offices. As a person overseeing the day-to-day operations and long-term planning, Li spent considerable time studying the commercial developments of the neighbourhood. Li elaborated: There is a restaurant called Vanilla—a Thai–Western fusion restaurant that offers a creative atmosphere. Another café, Arabica, is also very popular among young people. Many of the patrons of these hip restaurants and cafes have eventually become visitors to our museum. I would say the dynamic interactions between our museum and the surrounding F&B [food and beverage] services are crucial. The art spaces offer incentives for visitors to stay longer in the neighbourhood, which is incredibly beneficial to us.

36

I. LEUNG

The dynamic interplay between art, retail and dining services coexisting in the neighbourhood is one of the key factors behind the museum’s success. In the past few years, the museum has been leveraging the clustering effect of the neighbourhood to engage visitors from different markets. For example, museum members would enjoy exclusive discounts for dining at the surrounding restaurants, including a free dessert at Vanilla when they spend a certain amount. As recommended by Li, I had lunch at Vanilla after my meeting with her. Since it was located next to the museum at the former National Industrial Bank Building, it only took me a minute to find the restaurant. The restaurant’s interior—with its industrial design elements, such as concrete grey walls, beams and pipes—offered a stark contrast to the facade of the colonial-style building. Inside the restaurant, an array of snazzy and eye-catching objects, including dried flowers, cooking utensils and anatomical models, were tastefully placed inside glass-lidded apothecary jars and specimen holders that imitated the historic museum display cases. In the middle of the restaurant, two chairs facing each other between a small table were neatly presented in another display case, which reminded me of Marina Abramovi´c’s The Artist is Present, except that the artist was not there. Abramovi´c once said, ‘art is not just about another beautiful painting that matches your dining room floor’ (Abramovi´c 2022, para. 1). Whether the installation at the restaurant can ever transcend the purpose of mere decoration is in doubt. Yet, the various works of art, like the food offered in the restaurant, quickly became a selling point that attracted customers who valued this kind of artistic atmosphere. During lunchtime, the restaurant was crowded with well-to-do expatriates and hipsters who enjoyed mash-ups of traditional Thai and Western flavours. Opposite me was a suavely clothed businessman scrolling on a smartphone. On my left, a few trendily dressed young ladies embraced the culture of ‘the camera eats first’, photographing every single piece of food on the plate with their smartphones. From the microblogging site Weibo to the social media platform Xiaohongshu, the restaurant is a popularly tagged location where youngsters play with different lighting and camera angles to capture their food in front of art-filled backgrounds. In recent years, young people in China have widely adopted social media to research attractions where they can best spend their leisure time. Contents shared on social media influence young people’s decisions concerning what to buy, where to go and

2

ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM—A MUSEUM’S HISTORY …

37

what to eat. As well as being a strategic tool for restaurants to market their food, social media was vital to the museum’s marketing. How the museum is mediated by a broad web of relationships between physical and virtual spaces prompted me to learn more about the museum’s approach to social media. A week after lunch at Vanilla, I talked to Yu Yuan, the media relation officer of the museum, to gain some insights into how social media mirrored the museum’s exhibitions and the surrounding physical settings. Yu majored in finance in her undergraduate study. After completing her first degree, she studied fine art and creative industries in the United Kingdom. Yu was responsible for online content for the museum’s local and foreign social media pages. From Monday to Friday, the museum presents daily content on social media, covering posts with layperson’s terms to describe the museum’s complex exhibitions to articles written by various freelancers from diverse backgrounds. Yu’s enthusiasm for her job was obvious: I enjoy my job quite a lot, despite the fact that many of my friends are not interested in the arts. For most people, an art museum is kind of irrelevant. For me, a museum should position itself as a social space where everyone can interact. I believe that in China, many people are interested in taking photos wherever they go. I tend to look at this phenomenon positively. I always hope that our exhibition has photogenic elements. It is vital to win audiences’ interest so they visit our exhibitions. As for my job, I always contact KOLs [key opinion leaders] to promote our exhibitions. It greatly boosts visitor numbers.

According to Yu, not all exhibitions presented by the museum are naturally appealing enough, particularly video art, which is not immediately photogenic for social media. In these cases, Yu would identify alternative angles with different key opinion leaders and look for elements to promote the exhibitions. For Yu, audiences prioritising their interest in taking photos for social media rather than seeing artwork is not a problem. She thought it would at least offer visitors who were initially uninterested in visiting a museum the motivation to see her exhibitions. Although some people think that encouraging museum selfie-taking is a commercial gimmick, Yu considers it a way for visitors to engage with art on a more personal level. Either way, taking photographs for social media in shops, restaurants or museums has become a norm. Perhaps marketing a museum is not so different from marketing a restaurant in China. In a

38

I. LEUNG

context where museums and commerce are inseparable, my meeting with Yu reminded me of what Hsieh had said about his feelings towards the current art world in China in my interview with him: I think art is too easily absorbed by different forces in China. No one seems willing to take more risks to disrupt the status quo, both socially and in marketing. I wonder if art is merely a symbol of power, taste and wealth. I’ve been thinking about this question a lot recently. There are a lot of art museums now, and everyone loves them. Yet I wonder why our society seems to be somewhat going backwards. It’s a trend that many visitors go to a museum, take pictures then leave. I am afraid this simply means, ‘I am here to consume art’. Perhaps we cannot find an ultimate solution for the current problems in museums. Yet, as a curator, I believe it is crucial for us to always rethink what we do.

For Hsieh, the idea of professionalism in museums may prevent him from working experimentally, a practice that may be sullied by commerce and conventions. For Li and Yu, the market-driven approach for a museum is essential for innovation and higher performance standards. Regardless of one’s perspective, that is currently the reality for private museums in China. As I was wrapping up my interview with Yu at the cafe on the museum’s top floor, a sudden thought came to mind—what if I could travel back in time? How is the making, unmaking and remaking of the museum building, characterised by the present-day needs of Chinese society, different from the past?

Conclusion---A Historical Picture of the ‘Contemporary Epoch’, Top-Down Power and Bottom-Up Initiatives This chapter has presented the historical context of the Rockbund Art Museum by examining the history of the Shanghai Museum in the late Qing dynasty, followed by several interviews and observations of the museum’s built spaces and exhibitions and the surrounding neighbourhood over a decade. Several relevant points should be considered. Although the term ‘contemporary Chinese art’ has been adopted to distinguish the present from the past, the stories of the Rockbund Art Museum are not a culmination of events that organically shift to the present. Rather, the aforementioned ruptures that helped redefine

2

ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM—A MUSEUM’S HISTORY …

39

the boundaries of art indicate a significant continuity throughout the museum’s location. From the Shanghai Museum to the Preparatory Office of History and Development of Shanghai to the current Rockbund Art Museum, the difference in spatial form of the site over time provided a ‘presentist’ justification for history. The Shanghai Museum offered a model for the Chinese community during the Qing dynasty to perceive museums as multifunctional establishments where scientific, artistic, cultural and historical objects were reinterpreted through public display. The Preparatory Office marked a new era by utilising the site to promote a new national ideology. A coherent new national standard was applied to museums by ‘correcting’ the meanings of historical objects to align with the image of socialist realism. Rockbund Art Museum presents contemporary art as a new form of lifestyle alongside the newly developed public infrastructure. Occasionally, new discourses are radically transformed in the same site, while the museums’ administrative mechanisms have remained the same. The past of the Shanghai Museum became an unfinished project that was recounted as a machine to rationalise needs throughout different periods. The ruins, ideas and techniques offered by the British during the late Qing dynasty were protected, if not reincarnated, under the new spatial arrangement and cultural discourse. They were interpreted as the result of a new historical explanation and became the productive aim for the city’s current needs. Under the new schemes of land use, the city plays an important role in influencing new lifestyles through private real-estate-cum-art projects. These continuities suggest that the top-down flow of power and the alignment of society with disciplinary knowledge are embedded in the establishments surrounding the museum. The museum’s new spatial configurations show that the museum is now a means by which the city strives to build a cultural profile while also remaining a tool for articulating the past to support the present agenda. Museums are engineered in a new reality: upholding the power of the museum in the past, manifested in social life as a commodity for present-oriented cultural experiences. Museums are vital to sustaining disciplinary knowledge, characterised by consumer culture. The newly invented space and stylistic experiences of the Rockbund project provide pleasure and discipline within the ever-expanding boundaries of museum and governance. On the micro-level, individual agencies as stakeholders in the museum have always adopted specific tactics to give them an edge in their social

40

I. LEUNG

networks. The onus is on them to seize such opportunities, an action that often requires a certain degree of apt deviation from existing social, ethical and aesthetic rules. Lai invited Cai to exhibit works that critically commented on urbanisation during World Expo 2010. Hsieh further aimed to disrupt the museum as merely a place for consumption. They sought alternatives to international curatorial practices, striving to adjust themselves to the non-delineated rules of the game and gain recognition in the local art world. The socio-personal picture of the museum is indeed complex. The museum became a place for different social actors to negotiate different values and practices through their encounters. While Lai and Hsieh strived to negotiate boundaries in the art world, Li and Yu seized chances to leverage the real-estate project and social media to increase their presence in the field. They embraced the market-oriented nature of the museum business in China yet re-articulated the value of art, defending themselves for ‘selling their soul’ to the art market. They have invented alternative practices, novel concepts and new forms of stylistic experience to fabricate ecologically sustaining pleasures and desires in the art world’s ever-expanding boundaries. The site of the Rockbund Art Museum has been continually transformed, with the new spatial configuration permitting new discourses and retelling of past stories. The museum induces new forms of disciplinary knowledge while engaging the wider public’s interest in heritage, art and lifestyle.

References Abramovi´c, Marina. 2022. Marina Abramovi´c—Overview. The Lapis Press. https://lapispress.com/artists/25-marina-abramovic/overview/. Accessed 5 Oct 2022. Asia Art Archive. 2017. Time Traveler, 時光旅行者. Asia Art Archive. https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/library/time-traveler. Accessed 5 Oct 2022. Chin, Andrea. 2010. Rockbund Art Museum Cai Guo Qiang exhibition. Designboom. https://www.designboom.com/art/rockbund-art-museum-caiguo-qiang-exhibition/. Accessed 5 Oct 2022. Li, Xuemei. 2000. Essay. In Zhongxi meishu shoucang bijiao, 11–12. Hebei: Hebei Meishu Chubanshe. Tai, Li.-chuan. 2021. The Shanghai Museum and the introduction of taxidermy and habitat dioramas into China, 1874–1952. Archives of Natural History 48 (1): 111–130. https://doi.org/10.3366/anh.2021.0691.

2

ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM—A MUSEUM’S HISTORY …

41

The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels. n.d. History timeline: Hong Kong Hotel cultural history. https://www.hshgroup.com/en/About/History-of-Innova tion/History-Timeline. Accessed 5 Oct 2022. Varutti, Marzia. 2014. Techniques and sites of display of ethnic minorities. In Museums in China: The politics of representation after Mao, 145. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer Ltd. Wang, Hongjun. 2001. Essay. In Zhongguo bo wu guan xue ji chu, 94. Shanghai: Shanghai Gu Ji Chu Ban She. Willis, Carol. 2022. Preservation: Rockbund. The Skyscraper Museum. https:// old.skyscraper.org/EXHIBITIONS/CHINA_PROPHECY/rockbund.php. Accessed 5 Oct 2022. Wu, Fei, trans. 2015. Rockbund Art Museum’s 5 year anniversary celebration and fundraising auction. Ran Dian, July 13. http://www.randian-online.com/ np_market/ram-5-years-anniversary. Accessed 5 Oct 2022. Zhu, Fenghan. 2005. Essay. In Hui gu yu zhan wang: Zhongguo bowuguan fazhan bainian, 212. Beijing: Zi Jin Cheng Chubanshe.

CHAPTER 3

Long Museum and Yuz Museum—A Heterotopic Vision Mediated by Billionaires

This chapter studies private art museums built by billionaires who are eager to demonstrate China’s global resurgence. In recent years, private art museums have been massively established in first-tier and secondtier cities in China. The new ways of museological practice play a pivotal role in reshaping the landscape of Chinese society. The current museum-building phenomenon involving the emergence of billionaire art collectors and corporation-sponsored art collections across the country is characterised by an event-led urban regeneration policy. These museums reinforce the rising profile of billionaire collectors in tandem with the emerging middle class, who are adjusting their lifestyles to the explosive growth of the cultural economy. This chapter comprises two parts. Part 1 covers the Long Museum. Founded by collector Liu Yiqian and his wife, Wang Wei, the museum is China’s largest private museum. In 2014, the Long Museum extended its space in Pudong to a second branch located at the West Bund. The new location covers an area of 33,000 square metres, including exhibition and educational spaces. Its collection ranges from Eastern to Western art and from ancient to contemporary art. In addition to working with notable curators and advisors across the country, the Long Museum has been ambitious in shaping itself into a world-class private museum by

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I. Leung, Tracing Contemporary Chinese Art, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2668-8_3

43

44

I. LEUNG

strengthening its local cultural roots and presenting world-class exhibitions. Part 2 studies the Yuz Museum, also located in the West Bund. It is housed in a former hangar of Longhua Airport, which opened in the 1930s and was the city’s airport until the 1950s and oversees the structural transformation of Shanghai’s industries. The museum was financed by Budi Tek, a Chinese–Indonesian entrepreneur and collector. Known as one of the world’s top art collectors, Tek can be found in almost all notable international art magazines. Tek was the president and director of Sierad Produce, an Indonesia-based food company. His trajectory exemplifies the trend of many Chinese business tycoons whose business was formerly unrelated to art but who have emerged as powerful players in the national and global art world. This chapter covers extensive stories of my visits to the two museums, interviews and exhibition analysis, including an analysis of how private museums deal with Shanghai’s complex cultural landscape. It concludes by describing how private museums built by billionaire collectors inform their pursuit of art’s instrumental and spiritual benefits and how museums are transversely coordinated in this newly produced space in tandem with the city’s new cultural agenda. Finally, by juxtaposing the Long Museum and the Yuz Museum, this chapter explores how private museums offer a discursive relationship between exhibitions and visitors, capable of inventing a new sense of subjectivity for different players.

Part 1: Long Museum---A Museum’s Transformative Possibilities for Cultural Imagination Liu Yiqian, a former taxi driver, was born in 1963 to an ordinary workingclass family in Shanghai. According to an interview with BBC, Liu saw great stock trading opportunities in the newly implemented Shenzhen Special Economic Zone when he was 27 and earned his ‘first bucket of gold’ by buying stock that went from 100 yuan to 10,000 yuan within one year (Balfour 2015). This financial success in the stock market provided Liu with capital, which he invested in bigger projects in the 1990s and 2000s. His company, Sunline Group, invests in a wide range of industries, including chemicals, pharmaceuticals and financial services. Liu and Wang are among the most successful art investors in China. Like many billionaires who witnessed the Cultural Revolution and saw China’s economic opportunity in the past few decades, Liu transformed himself from a taxi driver to a museum owner. The phenomenon made

3

LONG MUSEUM AND YUZ MUSEUM—A HETEROTOPIC …

45

me curious about how the nouveau riche embraced artistic ideals and how building a museum has become a form of self-identity for them under the name of art. I visited the museum several times between 2017 and 2019 to gather first-hand experience of the spatial settings, exhibitions and activities to gain novel insight into how a billionaire’s museum is situated at the intersections of individual pursuits and a larger social system. Leisure and Aesthetic Experimentation—Architecture and Urban Design as a New Form of Lifestyle On 18 December 2018, I visited the museum for the fifth time. I continued to be impressed by the museum’s architecture. The museum was a superb architectural statement, a stunning mix of modern and industrial aesthetics. Once a wharf for coal transportation in the 1950s, the location was previously dotted with industrial facilities. The newly added cast-in-place concrete buildings are characterised by vaulted geometric forms, cantilevered overhangs and grillage-shaped steel facade systems. The brutal feeling brought by the unpainted concrete and repetitive geometric shapes reminded me of Le Corbusier’s Palace of Assembly in India. Although the former industrial facilities are no longer in use, the monolithic concrete aesthetics of the new buildings served perfectly as a symbol of Shanghai’s past and present—the birthplace of modern Chinese industry and an engine of post-industrial economic restructuring. The museum was a flagship project of the West Bund, one of the largest cultural districts in Shanghai. The initial planning of the museum, part of the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan, was led by former district mayor Sun Jiwei. Trained as an architect, Sun has been outspoken about his vision of urban planning in the last decade. He once said in a conference that Liu and Wang had little understanding of architecture, though they respected the opinions of Liu Yichun, the museum’s architect. The freedom given to Liu made the museum’s unique architectural design possible. For Sun, realising the museum project was a means for him to achieve his broader urban reform agenda. Since its inception, the museum was mediated by the purposive and instrumental agenda of the city’s development. Surrounding the museum’s newly constructed buildings was a 110metre coal-hopper unloading bridge, eminent evidence of the past. The tunnel-like structure of the bridge opened into the new concrete buildings and looked like an extended entrance to the museum, inviting visitors

46

I. LEUNG

to go through a time tunnel from past to present. Indeed, the bridge was a place where people gathered. The symmetric design of the bridge perfectly framed visitors in social media photos while they stood against layers of concrete columns. During my visit, many youngsters used their selfie sticks to pose for photos at the picture-perfect spot. Behind the bridge and in front of the grillage facade of the museum building, another group of people—including a film director and a few camera operators—stood in front of a male model dressed in a stretchy athletic outfit and ankle-length leggings. While the camera operators were busy assessing light levels to capture the perfect image, the model stretched his muscular body in preparation for the photo shoot. The out-of-context notion of athleticism in an outdoor museum area made me wonder how a museum’s architectural backdrop is associated with sport. Apparently, the answer could be found opposite the museum. Large and small billboards featuring Adidas’s campaign slogan ‘Run For The Oceans’ could be observed along the promenade in front of the museum. In June, Adidas presented an event in the same place, including hundreds of runners completing a 3 km run along the promenade. The campaign aimed to promote environmental protection by highlighting that the products worn by these runners were made of recycled marine plastic waste. Standing at a former manufacturing hub where gigantic tower cranes were still upright next to these advertisements, the industrial image in front of me greatly contradicted the brand’s advocacy campaign. As ironic as that image might sound, perhaps sense can be made in believing the apparent incompatibility of things—art, industrial leftovers, environment protection and sport crammed into one place. The unloading bridge and tower cranes served as an ideal representation of the past. Polluting industries are gone, replaced by recreational and cultural activities. The promenade offered Shanghai citizens a place to unwind from work; subsequently, a new lifestyle was introduced through the newly developed public infrastructure. The philosopher Lawrence Pearsall Jacks once said: A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. (Jacks 1932, pp. 1–2)

The spatial settings surrounding the museum are a particularly vivid example of how the establishment of a museum has offered the public a

3

LONG MUSEUM AND YUZ MUSEUM—A HETEROTOPIC …

47

new urban lifestyle intersecting and integrating myriad cultural forms. The museum discursively linked with other newly established sports facilities, commercial events and industrial remnants that allowed the production of new social behaviour. By introducing a collective sense of progressiveness through a historical lens of the past, the museum’s settings provided new opportunities for individuals to interact, rendering new cultural-cumleisure activities under the direction of modern knowledge and power. Standing in front of the surreal imagery, I could not help but think about Foucault’s ‘self as a work of art’—the creation of life by leisure and aesthetic experimentation becomes the art of living (Elliott 2020, p. 101). The museum entrance was towards the end of the unloading bridge. Before the main door was a large cement wall featuring a sponsors panel that vividly displayed the names of the museum’s donors. On the left, one could immediately spot the name Zhao Xu, the executive chairman of Poly Auctions. Known as ‘Superman Zhao’, Zhao brought Poly Auctions—the world’s third-largest art auction house—with a turnover exceeding 50 billion yuan within 10 years. The mother company, Poly Group, was widely believed to be linked to the country’s most powerful people. It was not surprising to see Zhao’s name at the centre of the panel. Most museums install plaques with sponsors’ names or have sponsors’ names inscribed at the entrance. Interestingly, most sponsors listed on the panel were top-notch auction houses, including Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Guardian Auctions and Beijing Council International Auction. I read the panel at the museum entrance closely for a few minutes; it felt like I was reading an auction house directory rather than a sponsors panel. Being one of China’s most successful art investors, Liu broke many auction records. In 2014, Liu bought a rare porcelain ‘chicken cup’ from the Chengua period at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for HK$36 million (Pomfret 2014). In the same year, he bought Amedeo Modigliani’s Nu couche, the most expensive Chinese painting ever sold outside China, for HK$170.4 million (Qin 2015). Apart from instilling feelings of gratitude, the sponsor’s panel also signalled Liu’s personal affiliation and the economy behind his museum’s operation. The Eternal Thread—Bourgeois’s Complex Love Towards Her Mother Stepping into the museum, no one could miss Louise Bourgeois’s monumental spider sculpture Maman. The work is part of The Eternal Thread,

48

I. LEUNG

drawn from a line in one of Bourgeois’s diaries and the first major retrospective of Bourgeois in China. Facilitated by blue-chip gallery Hauser & Wirth, the exhibition was initiated by the gallery’s president, Marc Payot, and Wang. The exhibition covered diverse works created by Bourgeois, ranging from personage sculptures produced in the late 1940s to her famous late career works that involved fabric and spiders. Sitting at the museum’s main space wrapped by massive industrial-looking walls, the 9-metre tall spider was the centre of attention. At any moment, more than 10 visitors walked around the sculpture. They navigated between the spider’s slender legs, which looked like a knobbly version of a Gothic cathedral’s columns. Other visitors stood still, gazed upward and took photos under the spider’s sac, suspended high above the ground. Next to Maman was a 6-metre tall mirror made of aluminium and stainless steel. No trip to the museum was complete without posing for a selfie in front of it. When visitors held up their phone, they saw themselves warped and distorted in the mirror’s reflection with LED lights under their faces that read ‘has the day invaded the night or has the night invaded the day?’. While many visitors were excitedly queueing to take selfies, I thought about Bourgeois’s troubled life. Bourgeois grew up with a painful childhood; her father was abusive, while her mother was complicit in her father’s abuse. As I stood there, a powerful emotion engulfed me—do the spectators possess any awareness of Bourgeois’s tumultuous life while capturing selfies in front of her artwork at the museum? Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland—A Productive Revolutionary Subjectivity After strolling through Bourgeois’s exhibition, I walked up the stairs to the museum’s first floor. In front of Gallery 3, a wall panel featured an image of two soldiers standing in a tower above the border between China and the Soviet Union. The soldiers stood up like sculptures with pride. This image was once handpicked by Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao Zedong’s wife. It was reproduced as a poster, and over half a million copies were distributed across China during the Cultural Revolution. Standing in front of the wall panel, one could feel a great sense of faith in revolution. The original painting was created by Shen Jiawei, a Shanghai-born Australian artist known for painting revolutionary images of workers and soldiers. Titled Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland, the exhibition at Long Museum was one of the largest exhibitions of Shen’s work

3

LONG MUSEUM AND YUZ MUSEUM—A HETEROTOPIC …

49

produced in the 1970s. While the starkness of bare concrete walls on the ground floor created a sense of consonance, the walls with intense red colour shades in the exhibition rooms on this floor appeared to be incredibly tempestuous, invoking strong emotions that rose in sharp contrast to Bourgeois’s exhibition. Stepping into the first room, one could find a statement written by painter and art historian Chen Lvsheng. It read: History repeats itself. In the early Ming dynasty, the ‘Northern Mongols and the Southern Japanese’ posed a never-before-seen border crisis for the Ming Empire. Over 400 years later, the Defensive Counterattack over Zhenbao Island in 1969 on China’s northern border and the Battle of the Parcel Islands in January 1974 on China’s southern border ignited nationwide patriotism to fight against common enemies. What’s different from the Ming dynasty is the demonstration of the consensus on militarisation and border security in many aspects of social life, one instance of which is a widely heard song called Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland, created around 1970: Holding a steel gun Bathed in alpenglow I am monitoring the border Standing guard for our great motherland A loyal heart devoted to Beijing all the time Standing at the frontier, as if standing in Tiananmen Square The radiant sun shines on the borderland Chairman Mao is right beside me Oh, I’m extremely happy and incomparably honoured, incomparably honoured To be a border guard of Chairman Mao.

The stories associated with the history of China’s revolutionary struggle have been preserved and recalled in many exhibitions of propaganda art. The historical incidents in the text were carefully crafted to fit the exhibition’s theme, grounding it in revolutionary subjectivity. The text was a reminder of the past and intended to convey the continuity of moral ideals to the present. Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland presented more than 90 manuscripts, sketches and oil paintings created by Shen Jiawei from 1968 to 1976. It offered visitors ‘a glimpse of the history of intellectual youth building a great China in the 1970s’ (Long Museum 2022, para. 5). Throughout the exhibition, portraits of Mao, soldiers, peasants

50

I. LEUNG

and factory workers were presented neatly, one after the other. The heroic gestures and smiley faces of these characters portrayed model behaviour, ideal ethical standards and a better future. The atmosphere of this exhibition was entirely different from Bourgeois’s, though it did not seem to matter to many visitors. An hour before, I saw a few young visitors taking pictures next to the gigantic spider on the ground floor. In this exhibition, they turned around to snap a selfie with the portraits of soldiers as the backdrop. Looking at these happy young visitors with shining eyes reminded me that Shen was once a member of the Communist Youth League of China when he was young. He then became popular for being a propaganda artist, specifically with the theme of the ‘intellectual youth’ (zhi qing ). During the Cultural Revolution, the younger generation played a critical role. They learned about Mao’s thoughts and class struggle. Propaganda art and revolutionary songs were vital in shaping the youths’ spirits. Perhaps the scenario where young people go up to the mountains and down to the countryside will not happen again. Indeed, the emotionally charged liberation offered by propaganda art for the educated youth in the past was renewed with new functions at Long Museum. When the visual narrative of the revolutionary past met the visitor’s self-representation, it became a new form of visual consumption. Regardless of the images offered in Shen’s paintings, it was clear that these paintings, including Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland, evoked great passion in Wang. In her exhibition statement, she said that the painting ‘lit a flame of enthusiasm’ for her and that the soldiers ‘awakened the collective memories and emotions of her generation’ when she first saw it (on the exhibition). Chen’s works, interpreted as a result of a new historical explanation, became the productive aim for the museum and Wang. Meanings of the past were constantly produced from the inextricable networks offered by the newly built museum. 1927–2017 Army Day 90th Anniversary—Between Chinese Identity and the Art Market The museum’s original premises in Pudong presented exhibitions aimed at drumming up a sense of enthusiasm about the nation. A week after I visited the exhibitions of Bourgeois and Shen, I visited the Pudong branch.

3

LONG MUSEUM AND YUZ MUSEUM—A HETEROTOPIC …

51

The exhibition at the Pudong branch was 1927–2017 Army Day 90th Anniversary. Like Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland, the exhibition showed how art played a role in representing the spirit of soldiers for their revolutionary cause. It covered more than 100 works, including oil paintings and prints, representing different periods since the 1930s. The selection of works included diverse themes, ranging from the defence of the motherland during the Korean War to works created after the 1970s, portraying the opening up of the economy. Before this exhibition, Long Museum had presented many exhibitions exploring similar themes, including Revolutionary Art Since the Yan’an Era and Revolutionary Art: Exhibitions of the 65th Anniversary of the Founding of People’s Republic of China. Of note, the provenance of these exhibitions’ works is that many of them were collected by Liu and Wang. In the preface of the exhibition catalogue of Revolutionary Art Since the Yan’an Era, Wang said: Most of our collections are bought through auctions … I would like to build a systematic collection to collect these works of art that represent a special historical period in China. Outside the National Museum, I have not heard of private collectors making outstanding achievements in this matter. (Chen and Wang, 2015, p. 4)

In addition to Wang’s interest in arts produced during the Cultural Revolution, her Chinese identity was one of the drivers for her to ambitiously collect ‘red art’. Ever since she began to collect Chinese art, she became more aware that her collecting interest was driven by pride and patriotism. Many artworks were dispersed after the Cultural Revolution. Wang bought these artworks, one by one, at auctions because she believed that artwork representing China’s modern history should be collected by Chinese people. She stated: In 2005, Guardian Auctions sold Chairman Mao Inspection of Countryside in Guangdong. When I saw the auction catalogue, I was very excited … At that time, I was very eager to buy this work, though it was finally bought by a Swiss. The commission in the auction was more than 10,000,000; it set the record for Chinese oil paintings at that time. At the auction, I held a paddle. I still feel very regretful that I did not buy this painting. Because the three Chinese who were holding paddles at the auction couldn’t beat a foreigner, I felt very uneasy. Later, I tried my best to buy all the works you see at the museum now. (Chen and Wang, 2015, p. 5)

52

I. LEUNG

In recent years, Liu and Wang have drawn worldwide attention to their active acquisition of artworks, domestically and internationally. The heated art market provided a logical explanation for Liu and Wang to collect art, in addition to their intention to buy a piece of history, because of its market potential. Indeed, Liu and Wang are among China’s most successful art investors. Between 2010 and 2012, they spent a combined total of nearly 2 billion yuan ($317 million) on art (Chan 2012). Although Wang will not reveal how much she spent, the media has focused on how much they could make from their collection (Fu 2012). Despite Liu’s interest in the art market, Wang reiterated that her goal was to keep the collection. At the end of her preface for the exhibition Revolutionary Art Since the Yan’an Era, she said: It is possible to think that I am collecting these works for profit, but this is not the case. The prices of these works may go up or down, but I never thought of putting them up for sale. (Chen and Wang, 2015, p. 5)

Instead of selling her collection, she wanted her children to keep the artworks and re-exhibit them in the future. For some people, Long Museum’s collection represents the nation’s integrity. For others, the art market is the central focus. Regardless of whether Liu and Wang will sell their collection in the future, it is certain that the art market remains relevant for a private museum.

Part 2: Yuz Museum---Museum Owner’s Creation of a Legacy During my trip to Shanghai, one of my favourite things to do was walk along the promenade of the West Bund. On 22 December 2018, after meeting up with a friend at Long Museum, I took another walk along the promenade. Twenty minutes later, I found myself at the side entrance of Yuz Museum. The entrance was part of a warehouse building. The building, painted red with a grey sliding door, was converted from an old aircraft hangar at Longhua Airport. It was once the most popular airport for amphibious aircraft and the biggest airport in the Far East between the 1930s and 1940s. The hangar was redesigned by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, who was selected to design the temporary Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2013.

3

LONG MUSEUM AND YUZ MUSEUM—A HETEROTOPIC …

53

At the museum’s entrance was a big panel presenting an image that everyone could recognise—a group of people in a darkened room where a huge mass of water drops was falling. It was the blockbuster installation Rain Room, which was previously shown in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Barbican. Apart from being famous for having long queues, the piece is known for allowing the audience to experience the sensation of controlling rain. The installation is presented with a field of recycled water perpetually falling from a suspended gantry. Whenever an audience is underneath, the 3D motion sensors installed in the ceiling stop water from dropping. Inside the museum, one could find traces of the past. The light-grey ceiling was lined with corrugated steel panels, bringing visitors back to the classic 1930s look of a structure designed to hold aircraft. Within a minute, I was guided to the main exhibition hall. Inside, one could find a dark room filled with falling water illuminated by several theatrical spotlights. The cinematic setting of the installation was somewhat like a Hollywood film production. Visitors broadcasted video of themselves mysteriously moving through the dark room. The silhouette of visitors dancing in the rain and couples making out, like in the Hollywood kissing-in-the-rain scene, became one of the most popular imagery on social media in Shanghai during the exhibition. Before I entered the dark room, I was advised not to walk quickly through the installation so I could avoid getting wet. Despite walking slowly, I felt water pouring over me wherever I went. It was a pity that the work did not perform as I expected. After a second, I pulled my soaked body out of the gallery and rushed to the washroom to dry myself. Atrium, Restaurant and Blockbuster Exhibitions The museum’s main building was an extension of the original aircraft hangar. At the entrance, a lady wearing a camel-coloured coat and a Chanel handbag with a gold chain over her shoulder walked elegantly into the glass-covered atrium. Despite the city issuing a ban on Christmas decorations, there was a snowman beside a Christmas tree decorated with ornaments just behind the entrance. The atrium offered visitors an array of amenities, including a ticket office, a museum shop and a restaurant. The restaurant was where most sleek and well-dressed visitors assembled, sitting around at marble tables sipping their coffee or flipping fashion magazines borrowed from the restaurant’s magazine rack.

54

I. LEUNG

At the museum shop, various products ranging from KAWS’s expensive bear-shaped figures to locally designed homeware were neatly presented. Like the Rain Room, Yuz Museum presented many blockbuster exhibitions that were crowd-pleasing and expensive. In 2017, the museum brought KAWS: WHERE THE END STARTS, a major survey exhibition previously hosted at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas. From cartoon figures like Snoopy and The Simpsons to giant sculptures portraying hybrid cartoon and human characters, the exhibition explored culture associated with a society dominated by consumption. It drew record attendance and attracted many young people who had been fans for years before seeing the largest KAWS exhibition in China. A year after this exhibition, the museum presented another highly popular exhibition: The Artist is Present included more than 30 Chinese and international artists. Co-presented with fashion brand Gucci, the exhibition was curated by Maurizio Cattelan, who later found fame when his fresh banana affixed to a wall with duct tape sold for US$120,000 at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019 (O’Neil 2019). The luxury brand first entered Shanghai in 1997; since then, the city has been one of Gucci’s most dynamic cities for retail sales growth in the last two decades. Apart from having four branches in the city, Gucci also opened a restaurant in a luxury shopping mall on Huaihai Road in 2015. The popularisation of luxury items created a new stratum of the emerging middle and upper class with spending power, providing a strong impetus for fashion brands to work with local artists and museums. Unlike Long Museum, where ‘red art’ became one of the key curatorial directions, Yuz Museum was known for its ties with international cultural institutions. The Alberto Giacometti Retrospective was in collaboration with Fondation Giacometti. Andy Warhol, Shadows was arranged by the Dia Art Foundation. In addition, the museum invited star curators, such as Jeffrey Deitch and Karen Smith, to arrange the exhibition Overpop— New Art from Yuz Collection and Beyond. These exhibitions not only drove attendance but also effectively put the city on the global art map. Chief Executive Officer—A Successor Continuing the Legacy Since the opening of the museum in 2014, whenever I visited Yuz Museum, I felt a burning desire to know: why a museum? How did someone who started with agriculture and then moved to food processing businesses come to deal with the art world? I scheduled a coffee with

3

LONG MUSEUM AND YUZ MUSEUM—A HETEROTOPIC …

55

Justine Alexandria, chief executive officer of the museum, hoping to find an answer. ‘Would you like tea or coffee?’ Alexandria, a thirty-something, downto-earth woman, asked me in a welcoming voice. We were seated in the middle of the museum’s restaurant. As I poured milk into my coffee, we started the interview. Our conversation began with how she became a museum director. As she took a sip of tea, she said: I got an opportunity to work here. (…) I was asked to come here to help, so that’s pretty much how I stepped into the art world.

The fact that Alexandria is Tek’s daughter is no secret in the Shanghai art world. She joined the Yuz Foundation in 2015 and became the museum’s chief executive officer in 2018. Looking at Cattelan’s olive tree planted in a cube of dirt right in the middle of the museum restaurant, I then asked Alexandria her thoughts about Cattelan, who is known for being an art world prankster. In a firm and endearing tone, she replied: I have to say, it was pretty bizarre when I first saw contemporary art. I was, like, ‘this is art??’ … Every time I look at the work, I don’t really understand why the work is created like that. But then the philosophy behind it is something that interests me.

Alexandria majored in environmental science and did not have an artistic background, which most museum directors would have. Among the 23 staff members working at the museum, half of the team was responsible for the daily operational tasks of the museum. Alexandria oversaw diverse administrative tasks, ranging from branding, public relations, marketing, advertising, business development and government relations. She continued: I think I have quite a boring life! Hmm … If I am on duty, I will be checking with all of the galleries and the artworks, making sure everything is alright and ready for the opening, and the volunteers are there, the security, the front desk is ready, the cafeteria is ready, etc. … A lot of the interesting part is that you might have a lot of different calls, from overseas and from China; you also receive a lot of government official visits, and you have to bring them in and show them around.

56

I. LEUNG

According to Alexandria, Tek was invited by the city to inspect the site of the current West Bund back in the early 2010s. For a long time, Tek desired to open a museum in China to exhibit his collection. Coincidently, the Xuhui District had the idea to redevelop the waterfront area into a culture-oriented district. It was a perfect match. Since the museum was established, Tek has endeavoured to bring the world’s attention to Shanghai. For him, China was so misunderstood by the world. Opening the museum was a mission he wanted to achieve to change people’s perceptions of China. Alexandria explained: In the beginning, he had one museum in Jakarta, but he really wanted to come back to China because he is patriotic to our country. He actually visited quite a lot of spaces, including Beijing … He kinda fell in love once he saw the aeroplane hangar and decided that this is what he wanted … I think the government is so proud of what was being delivered in this district. They might also want to hold another sector for technology, so I think the whole place would be about art and technology. I think they are building DreamWorks? I am not sure but probably a film production warehouse. So, the whole area will be pretty interesting once everything is built up and, hopefully, it will become a popular spot for people to come on the weekend.

As Alexandria talked enthusiastically about the development of the West Bund, it prompted me to ask whether she considered Long Museum a competitor in the district. For her, the relationship between the different West Bund museums positively affected each other. Rather than considering the museums as competitors, she thought the different curatorial directions adopted by the two museums might attract visitors to visit one museum after another within the same neighbourhood. The West Bund initiative that involved billionaires investing in opening private museums served not only as a status symbol for the ultra-rich but also as a means of imbricating in networks of money, power and lucrative real-estate development deals. In addition to Long Museum, Yuz Museum, DreamWorks and many other big names, the district also planned to join hands with the Centre Pompidou for a five-year project, with many real-estate projects coming along the way. Despite the potential benefits, all private museums in China faced the same issue—non-profit status. Alexandria explained: We don’t know the status of our application yet, to be honest … I believe this is something a lot of museums are still searching for. I think one of the things that’s more like a textbook kind of thing is that, in one way or another, you

3

LONG MUSEUM AND YUZ MUSEUM—A HETEROTOPIC …

57

need to go to public. Private museums are based on the founder who built it, but what happens when the founder is no longer there? Is someone else gonna continue to keep it private? So I think it depends on the commitment of the successor. The easiest way is, of course, to turn public. There are always pros and cons when you turn a museum public. You don’t have that much flexibility or freedom to decide what exhibition you want … So we are not sure, to be honest, I can’t really answer that. We are trying to figure out ways to raise awareness, and we did talk with the government to see whether they would have tax incentives. We have been talking to the culture bureau, and they understand; they kinda know how it works, but tax is not an easy thing in China … so this is gonna be a long way to run.

Referring to museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which used to be private museums, Tek once said that he wished for Yuz Museum to become a public institution one day. Perhaps it will be a long time before the museum goes public. In the meantime, Tek established a foundation to help the museum find financial resources. While the foundation owned Tek’s collection, the museum was responsible for guaranteeing the exhibitions’ artistic quality. The two entities were independent and yet affiliated with each other. As the foundation does not rely only on state funding but attempts to build its own financial resources, I wondered how it makes money. According to Alexandria, corporate sponsorships, venue rental and ticketing were the different sources of income. Considering the foundation’s finances, presenting a popular exhibition that appeals to the mass public was essential for a good balance sheet. For example, previous exhibitions that involved art stars, such as KAWS, Random International and Cattelan, attracted many visitors ranging from fashionistas to well-to-do expatriates and international school students. These exhibitions were typically presented collaboratively with foreign institutions, which reduced the museum’s production costs while raising productivity. The museum did not have any full-time professional curators, and Wu Hung was the only official person who advised on the curatorial direction of exhibitions. Therefore, the museum took advantage of international collaborations when publication and exhibition plans were readily available in a package. Alexandria explained: So, for the bigger show, we would try to advertise as much as we can, and we would try to use that advantage to let people know that Yuz Museum is there. So I think that’s our strategy for our zero budget … Also, to make your

58

I. LEUNG

museum pop up, you also need to be able to connect it to the world. And for a lot of the Chinese museums that are government owned, we cannot really compare with them, so we bring something that China never sees … to be honest, for Asians going to Europe, I don’t think they are going to museums, they will probably be going shopping, I don’t know. We really wanted to bring something from overseas here as a cultural platform in a sense, so we tried to balance it [the finances] off.

In March 2022, Tek died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 65. In an interview before his death, he said: My life is going to be ending—everybody’s life is ending—but the artworks will have a much longer lifespan than us, because they recorded history. It’s very special for me to be the keeper of this history. (Goldstein 2019a, b)

The goodwill of Tek and Alexandria to create a landmark for Shanghai while sharing their art collection and documenting the history of Chinese art is admirable. In recent years, Tek had been actively planning his legacy, announcing a partnership between the foundation and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The collaboration marked a new page for the museum’s international presence, yet it effectively allowed a foreign museum to co-own Tek’s collection. The cross-national partnership was perhaps a smart way to secure the holdings of a private museum in China. Private museums are based on the founder who built them, but what happens when the founder is no longer there? Guanxi (an individual’s social ties of mutually beneficial personal and business relationships) networks are dynamic—what if the museum’s relationships change over time? Before I ended my conversation with Alexandria, she told me that Tek had sold all his businesses after learning he had cancer. She added, smiling at the thought, ‘he wanted to retire; he was too tired and he got sick … This is his passion in art and culture, agriculture is work’. When I was ready to leave the restaurant after my coffee with Alexandria, I could not help but wonder what Tek had in mind before his departure. On this puzzling note, I closed another delightful day in the museum next to Cattelan’s olive tree.

3

LONG MUSEUM AND YUZ MUSEUM—A HETEROTOPIC …

59

Conclusion---Heterotopic Vision Brought by the Billionaires In this chapter, I have described a few of my visits to Long Museum and Yuz Museum. By studying the sites in terms of their geography, built environment, administrative infrastructure, arrangements of objects and the routine activities of the art administrators and audiences, this chapter illustrates how the socialising and spatialising practices tell stories about Chinese billionaires’ private museums in relation to the broader societal context. In Of other spaces: Utopias and heterotopias, Foucault explains heterotopia as configured spaces where elements are connected on a temporal axis—an ‘ensemble of relations’ permitting contestation and juxtaposition of the mythical and the real (Foucault 1984, p. 1). At Long Museum, the different reasonings of surrealism, feminist art and ‘red art’ are brought together in a single building and within an enclosed totality of time— a timeless space offering a heterotopic vision mediated by hybridity of contents and sensitivities. The ‘narrativised forms of spectacle’ in the museum, including collecting, ordering, classifying, conserving, interpreting and constructing knowledge (Hetherington 2011, p. 460), has a logic of its own. It offers entertaining, educational and representational means that allow objects to renew their meanings constantly. Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland retells the story of the Ming dynasty to create new knowledge for the Cultural Revolution. The visitors’ encounters within the museum space—whether using Bourgeois’s spider and mirror or appreciating the hero portrayed in propaganda art and using it as a backdrop for a selfie—are coordinated and performed inherently to the museum’s transformative possibilities for cultural imagination. The past is conceptualised as an ideal representation in these exhibitions, capable of offering a perfect presentist portrayal of history. However, the visitors’ experience is framed by an illusion characterised by fantastic and erratic modern art and exhibition designs, and a new gazing experience is subsequently constructed through an imaginary displacement of reality. For Yuz Museum, the international exhibitions serve as a linked site for circulating new knowledge. The Rain Room offers visitors a sense of synthetic reality, creating an illusion like Laura Bieger’s notion of the ‘aesthetics of immersion’ (Bieger 2012). Exhibitions featuring KAWS, Cattelan, Giacometti and Warhol aimed to produce an all-encompassing

60

I. LEUNG

experience of visual consumption drawn from across the globe, bringing the ‘elsewhere’ to here and now. The museum is a site capable of creating ‘spectacles of the world-as-exhibition’ (Mitchell 1989, p. 222), promising a sense of freedom and pleasure that are in line with visitor’s tastes yet engaging visitors who believe they are at the centre of the world through the process of imagination. Slices of time and objects that once existed and were knowable elsewhere are brought into the newly invented museums. The discursive relationship between different exhibitions constructs visitors as subjects. The subjective roles constructed through the heterotopic vision of museums also offer a way for different players to discover their passion, embrace their value and reinvent themselves. The stories of Liu, Wang, Tek and Alexandria show that establishing a private museum is a way for them to facilitate and re-establish their identities. Throughout their journey, they transform themselves from a taxi driver, a food company owner or an environmental science graduate to the most influential people in the art world. They strive to create a unique form of selfhood out of mundane life and thoroughly reinvent themselves alongside the emergence of a new art market and land development opportunities. Apart from manifesting their personal virtues through buying, collecting and displaying art, opening a private museum was also implicitly rendered as a favourable result of the city’s efforts in the name of patriotism, reform and financial gain. They effectively project themselves as patriots, investors and philanthropists through the museums, successfully exhibiting their achievements alongside the city’s glory and national pride. The newly established cultural spaces also allow visitors to manipulate their perceptions of their personal identity and subjective freedom. Going to exhibitions and posing for a selfie in front of artworks, regardless of whether it is ‘red art’ or KAWS’s figures, makes self-cultivation possible. While art appreciation moves beyond the walls of the private collectors’ homes, the dispersed art events that were established across a broader population allow art to play a role in reshaping individuals and their subjectivities. This phenomenon is particularly vivid on the promenade, where a new lifestyle was brought through the newly developed public infrastructures surrounding the two museums. Art, sports, heritage and many other social activities purposefully interact to construct a new rationale for everyday life that intersects with personal and public needs.

3

LONG MUSEUM AND YUZ MUSEUM—A HETEROTOPIC …

61

References Balfour, Frederik. 2015. The Expensive Antics of China’s Gaudiest Billionaire. Bloomberg.com, April 17. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/201504-17/the-expensive-antics-of-china-s-gaudiest-billionaire?leadSource=uve rify+wall. Accessed 5 Oct 2022. Bieger, Laura. 2012. Travelling in image-space. The ‘new’ Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon Skywalk. In Moving Images – Mobile Viewers: 20th Century Visuality, ed. Renate Brosch, 43–63. Berlin: Lit. Chan, Kelvin. 2012. Asia’s superrich build their own art museums. Yahoo! News, May 9. https://news.yahoo.com/asias-superrich-build-own-art-064723313. html. Accessed 5 Oct 2022. Chen, Lvsheng, and Wei Wang. 2015. Preface. Essay. In Revolutionary Art Since the Yan’an era: Extended Edition, 4–7. Beijing: People’s Fine Arts Publishing House. Elliott, Anthony. 2020. Technologies of the self. In Concepts of the Self . Cambridge: Polity Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. Of other spaces: Utopias and heterotopias. Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité, October. Fu, Ting. 2012. Now China’s super rich are building private museums to house their art collections. Business Insider, May 9. https://www.businessinsi der.com/chinas-impenetrable-underground-bunkers-2012-6. Accessed 5 Oct 2022. Goldstein, Andrew. 2019. Collector Budi Tek on his ‘mission impossible’: To give China its first public contemporary art museum before he dies. Artnet News, February 6. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/budi-tek-interviewpart-1-1455346. Accessed 5 Oct 2022. Hetherington, Kevin. 2011. Foucault, the museum and the diagram. The Sociological Review 59 (3): 457–475. Jacks, L. P. 1932. Essay. In Education through recreation, 1–2. London: University of London Press. Long Museum. 2022. Standing guard for our great motherland. http://www. thelongmuseum.org/en/exhibition-369/1297.html. Accessed 4 Oct 2022. Mitchell, Timothy. 1989. The world as exhibition. Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (2): 217–236. http://www.jstor.org/stable/178807. O’Neil, Luke. 2019. One banana, what could it cost? $120,000 – if it’s art. Guardian, December 6. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddes ign/2019/dec/06/maurizio-cattelan-banana-duct-tape-comedian-art-baselmiami. Accessed 5 Oct 2022. Pomfret, James. 2014. Ming dynasty ‘chicken cup’ smashes record in $36 million sale. Reuters, April 8. https://www.reuters.com/article/china-ceramics-rec ord-ming-cup-idINDEEA3707120140408. Accessed 5 Oct 2022.

62

I. LEUNG

Qin, Amy. 2015. Chinese taxi driver turned billionaire bought Modigliani painting. New York Times, November 10. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/ 11/11/arts/international/liu-yiqian-modigliani-nu-couche.html. Accessed 5 Oct 2022.

CHAPTER 4

Art districts—A reflection on the fate of Chinese cities

This chapter describes my experiences in the field in several of Shanghai’s art districts, including West Bund, the former French Concession Area and Red Town. It zooms out to a wider perspective of various art locations in Shanghai and studies how art districts organise people’s lives, their ecological networks and the physical distribution of their livelihood in space. Through the study of the architectural arrangement, history and activities within various districts, this chapter explores how players and art institutions operate together by creating networks of settlement. Some of these districts witnessed radical changes over the last decade because many urban developments in China are built on a pattern of demolishing and rebuilding for economic growth. This chapter will examine individual sites and observe changes over time. Given that some of the sites no longer exist, my eyewitness accounts are a valuable resource for readers. This chapter will begin in West Bund, where Yuz Museum and Long Museum are located. West Bund is one of the largest cultural districts in Shanghai and is part of a project of the 13th Five-Year Plan. A major manufacturing hub once stood along the expansive stretch of shoreline along the Huangpu River. The district aspires to develop infrastructure for the creative, technology and finance industries by embracing development principles such as ‘planning-based’, ‘culture-oriented’, ‘eco-based’ and ‘technological-innovation-driven’ (West Bund, n.d.a). At West Bund, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I. Leung, Tracing Contemporary Chinese Art, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2668-8_4

63

64

I. LEUNG

the boundaries between art, technology, finance and recreation are definitive entities but are still up for negotiation under the new land strategy. To illustrate the historical pattern of art districts in Shanghai, part two of this chapter traces back to earlier forms of art districts. Red Town— located on Huaihai West Road in Changning District—was one of the most comprehensive art districts and housed a major museum, an advertising firm, restaurants and offices for the creative industries. The site was once home to the Tenth Steel Plant, an initiative of Deng Xiaoping, the second-largest steel producer in the world. It served as a symbolic location where key government officials, including Zhu Rongji, Huang Ju and Wu Bangguo, made crucial decisions affecting China’s economy. Shanghai’s trend of urbanisation, where heavy industries were replaced by service industries with an emphasis on the arts, was evident in the changes in spatial use of the factory edifices in the city. Red Town’s stories illustrate how contemporary art is used as an instrumental tool to facilitate realestate development in many impoverished neighbourhoods. This includes the sweeping creation and destruction of art districts. Despite the district’s success, land development ultimately destroyed it. The district was slated for demolition in 2017. Drawing on extensive sources of materials from repeated visits to the districts since 2010, this chapter analyses how distinct architectural developments, objects and people were conscientiously arranged to produce new identities in a formulaic set of relations. It offers a wider perspective on how the ephemeral dynamics of restless market forces and state intervention shape and are influenced by art, as well as how the profound transformations of urban reformation recreate power relations among players in the art world.

Part 1: West Bund In the last chapter, my recurrent visits to Long Museum and Yuz Museum demonstrated that private art museums built by billionaires offer a discursive relationship between exhibits and visitors. This chapter’s opening section provides a bird’s-eye view of the area where both museums are located. By illustrating some ground-level observations, this section demonstrates how various establishments within the West Bund district work together as a network of settlements.

4

ART DISTRICTS—A REFLECTION ON THE FATE OF CHINESE …

65

Context—Unstoppable Urban Expansion In recent years, different Chinese cities have become increasingly eager to envision their future. Shenzhen’s ‘Global Pioneer City’, Hangzhou’s ‘World Famous City’, Wuhan’s ‘2049 Master Plan’ and Beijing’s ‘2035 Master Plan’ are among the many programmes determined to elevate various first and second-tier cities to a global stage. As for Shanghai, the ‘2035 Master Plan’ was proposed in alignment with the country’s national strategy of the ‘new era’. The plan confirmed Shanghai as a leader in reform and aimed to build the city as an ‘excellent global city’ by 2035 (Hu and Chen 2020). Back in 2010, Shanghai began the implementation of the ‘Comprehensive Development Plan for Both Sides of the Huangpu River’, which included the redevelopment of the former Shanghai World Expo site, the Xuhui waterfront and the Qiantan International Business Zone. This plan is part of Shanghai’s ‘12th Five-Year Plan’, a series of initiatives defining policies to meet the targets of economic growth every five years (West Bund, n.d.b). Endorsed by the national congress, the various large-scale construction projects aim to capitalise on the city’s status as a national manufacturing hub in the twentieth century and transform itself into a hub for finance, trade, culture and technological innovation. To increase regional competitiveness in the age of the new economy, the masterplan is supported by three pillars, including the cultural industries, technological innovation and financial industries. Under this framework, the district will house three major hubs: West Bund Media Port, West Bund Smart Valley and West Bund Financial Hub (Liu 2017b, a). West Bund’s development plan was announced 12 years ago. In actuality, the district has established itself as one of the city’s most exciting destinations for art and culture. In addition to the Long and Yuz Museums, the district is home to major art institutions covering a variety of art spaces. Currently, blocks of museums, commercial galleries and exhibition spaces are located alongside the promenade in place of industrial buildings and transportation infrastructure. For example, another private museum called Tank Shanghai is located around a 10-minute walk from the Yuz Museum. The museum, which was once an abandoned industrial site consisting of five empty oil tanks, has been renovated and is now the second home of collector Qiao Zhibing’s 500-piece art collection. Famous for displaying works by Olafur Eliasson, Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley and Damien Hirst in his karaoke bars where

66

I. LEUNG

patrons could indulge in drinks and songs next to expensive artwork, Qiao’s project is yet another example of a renowned private museum that costs hundreds of millions of dollars in the district (Pollack 2016). A short distance from Tank Shanghai lies the West Bund Art Center. Formerly an aircraft factory, the location now hosts the annual West Bund Art & Design flagship art fair. Most art fairs, notably SH Contemporary, were hosted at the Shanghai Exhibition Center before West Bund was established. The Asia–Pacific region has recently been dominated by Art Basel Hong Kong while many art fairs in China, including SH Contemporary, were at risk of going out of business. Despite profit generation still being uncertain at this stage, galleries yearn to maintain a close relationship with potential customers and strive to be a leader in Shanghai’s dynamic art scene. Sharing 50% of its participating galleries with Art Basel Hong Kong, West Bund Art & Design fair is frequented by top international art galleries every year, such as Lehmann Maupin, David Zwirner, Gagosian and Perrotin (Devi 2021). West Bund became the must-visit location for the city’s super-rich in November. The emergence of a new social stratum in the city also motivated corporations to fund cultural programmes to gain global visibility; these included UBS, Dior and BMW. One of the main objectives of the ‘12th Five-Year Plan’ is to strengthen cultural exchange and foreign trade. West Bund Art Center offers cross-disciplinary software and hardware facilities in tandem with an upgraded version of urban governance, all while strategically aligning with the national agenda. In addition to private museums and art fairs, the district serves as a venue for diplomatic activities that facilitate cultural exchanges between different nations. In 2017, the West Bund Museum and the Centre Pompidou in France signed a cooperation agreement that called for a five-year collaboration (Centre Pompidou, n.d.). Showcasing foreign artworks in China and circulating Chinese art elsewhere has proven the city’s passion for garnering international attention. MadeIn Gallery—Trajectory of Distinct Locations and a Spatial Path of Art History Since the establishment of the West Bund district, many galleries have set their feet next to major private museums. One such example is the MadeIn Gallery. Commercial galleries run by art dealers are popular in the art world; however, it is rare for an artist to own a gallery while

4

ART DISTRICTS—A REFLECTION ON THE FATE OF CHINESE …

67

concurrently being represented by other commercial galleries. Xu Zhen, a unique figure in the Shanghai art world, opened the MadeIn Gallery and Xu Zhen Store in 2016, which have since become symbols of his success as an artist and gallery owner. The history of MadeIn Gallery can be traced back to BizArt, a seminon-profit art space that was first founded by curator Davide Quadrio in 1998 and later became a mainstay for Xu Zhen and other artists. Back in 2000, BizArt set up its office on Huaihai West Road. After the gallery’s original location was demolished two years later, it moved three times before finally settling in M50 on Moganshan Road. The gallery was shut down and renamed MadeIn Gallery in 2010. Now a commercial gallery fully owned by Xu, MadeIn Gallery relocated again in 2016 when new retail and office spaces started to emerge in West Bund. With the change from BizArt to MadeIn Gallery, there has been an organisational shift in the art market from an unstructured to a hierarchically structured chain, made possible by remote art clusters in Shanghai; these include the former French Concession area, Moganshan Road—which turned into an art hub—and now West Bund. MadeIn Gallery’s trajectory emblemises how Shanghai’s extensive relocation, demolition and construction of art districts have greatly mediated art. On 14 May 2017, I took a flight from Hong Kong to Shanghai to visit Feng Mengbo’s exhibition at the MadeIn Gallery. I first met Feng in 2010. It was just before I curated One World Exposition, an exhibition that featured Feng as well as many other Chinese artists who were a part of the 85’s Movement, such as Qiu Zhijie, Wang Jianwei and Zhang Peili. Even though it had been more than a decade, I can still recall the first time I met Feng in his Beijing duplex apartment, where a row of arcade game machines stood as they did in gaming centres back in the 1980s. We enjoyed drinks until two in the morning during our enjoyable first meeting as Feng talked about the history of each of his toys one by one. I first saw Feng’s art in 2003 at the French Center Pompidou before I ever met him. It was part of the exhibition Alors, la Chine?, in which Feng’s Ah_Q showed himself shooting while his blood splashed the screen of a video game. He looked exactly like the character portrayed in Ah_Q , except he was not half-naked with blood all over his face. That night in his apartment, Feng recalled the exhibition at the Center Pompidou as one of the most prominent exhibitions in which he had

68

I. LEUNG

taken part in his early career. In the early 2000s, only a handful of contemporary Chinese artists had managed to locate significant venues abroad to exhibit their art. The idea of a gallery was just starting to take shape in Shanghai at the time. Looking back, it is difficult to imagine how drastically contemporary Chinese art has changed. Feng exhibited his work at the French Center Pompidou almost two decades ago. Now, Feng was having his solo exhibition in a gallery with Center Pompidou’s collection being exhibited just a few steps away. The exhibition at MadeIn Gallery was titled Feng Mengbo: Museum. The exhibit opened with a video game and showed audiences an arcade gaming machine, which was installed with a piece that appeared to be a sequel to Feng’s famous Long March: Restart! Visitors stepped into an expansive collection of toy figures based on various games and popular characters. Video games have always been Feng’s passion and the show was a perfect reflection of his interests. Despite the well-displayed artwork, the exhibition’s main attraction for most attendees was its social atmosphere. At the MadeIn Gallery’s several opening receptions, most guests wait out on the street instead of admiring the artwork inside. Feng’s opening was no exception. Similar to a gala event when celebrities are being interviewed as they walk up a red carpet, a videographer with a cap stood in front of the gallery entrance and used a tripod to capture the movements of every guest. Next to the videographer was Xu Zhen, who stood right in front of the entrance. Xu was clearly identified as a laoban. Guanxi is important in the art world, without which it is impossible to accomplish anything. Many familiar faces from the Shanghai art community had gathered around Xu as if waiting for the right moment to greet him. He immediately became the centre of attention. In about 20 minutes, I joined Feng on a bench along the promenade. He lit his cigarette and introduced me to a few curator friends. ‘How was Art Basel in Hong Kong this year?’ asked one of the curators who was in his twenties. Money is power. Today, art fairs command the attention of the art world. For many people in the Shanghai art community, Art Basel is practically equivalent to Hong Kong. I was accustomed to this recurring question. Feng continued to talk to me about his previous encounters in the city. ‘I can still clearly remember the first time I went to Hong Kong in the early 1990s. Johnson took me to his gallery in Central and we had lunch at the China Club’, said Feng.

4

ART DISTRICTS—A REFLECTION ON THE FATE OF CHINESE …

69

He was referring to Johnson Chang, who is widely regarded as one of the first dealers to specialise in contemporary Chinese art. His seminal exhibitions, such as The Stars: 10 Years in 1989 and China’s New Art, Post-1989 in 1993, were instrumental in successfully introducing many Chinese artists to the Western world. Chang’s Hanart TZ Gallery originally served as the representation for blue-chip artists such as Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Xiaogang and many others who went on to achieve international fame. Feng frequently brought up Chang and Hong Kong on different occasions. According to Feng, Chang had been very generous in supporting his career over the years. Back in the early 1990s, when Feng was still an emerging artist, Chang would offer him financial support during his stay in Hong Kong. Feng’s trips to Hong Kong had a profound impact on him; the popular culture and international sophistication exposed him to diverse sources of inspiration and contacts. Hanging out at the Hanart TZ Gallery and having dinner at the China Club were among a variety of activities that Feng felt greatly inspired him. While Feng was excitedly talking about Hong Kong, I noticed the young curators standing next to us looked a bit indifferent. One shrugged his shoulder and looked a little lost. He belonged to a generation that grew up during the period of the explosive economic boom when museums and galleries were readily accessible. He certainly had no idea what Feng was referring to. Standing right in front of the MadeIn Gallery, I could not help but reflect on how, in the past, when mainland China lacked any sort of art infrastructure, the Hanart TZ Gallery and China Club played a crucial role in shaping contemporary Chinese art. Indeed, the many historical junctures of contemporary Chinese art meet with the emergence of art districts inside the endless process of land development in Shanghai during the past two decades. Being an eyewitness to events that occurred both in Hong Kong and cities in mainland China, Feng’s trajectory reveals multifarious relations unique to distinct locations at different moments across history. Time changes everything. Unlike Feng, many of the artists that Hanart TZ Gallery used to represent have gradually left. Some stories have happy endings, some do not. In recent years, the damaging ‘break up’ stories between Chang and the ‘85 New Wave artists have been extensively covered in articles. For example, a Southern Weekly article claimed that Chang monopolised the contemporary Chinese art market and has

70

I. LEUNG

amassed a large fortune by buying batches of artworks from artists without their express consent (Southern Weekly 2015). No matter how accurate the rumours were, one thing for certain: contemporary Chinese art has been extensively disseminated throughout the last few decades, and there have never been more opportunities for individual artists to pursue their professional goals in China’s newly developed spaces. For example, in the early 1990s, Hanart TZ Gallery was one of the first to exhibit Shanghai artist Ding Yi’s work. Alongside the opening of the Shanghart Gallery in 1996 and the emergence of M50 in Shanghai, Ding Yi ended his partnership with Chang. The success of M50 paved the way for the creation of different art districts in Shanghai, providing favourable conditions for art exhibitions and trade. The rest is history. A year before I visited Feng’s exhibition, Shanghart Gallery opened another new location in West Bund. Inside the two-story building, one can find a library, an archive, a rooftop terrace and artwork created by numerous artists who once crossed paths with Chang in the past. Hanart TZ gallery later bid farewell to Pedder Building, which is known as the hub for art galleries in Hong Kong. The gallery is presently located in its former warehouse for storing art, which is in a lesser-known industrial building in Kwai Chung, located far away from the centre of Hong Kong. A few months after Feng’s opening, I had the chance to eat lunch at China Club. In addition to Chang, entrepreneur David Tang is renowned for his role in building a connection between contemporary Chinese art and the outside world. His collection of contemporary Chinese art was displayed in the club like a miniature museum, bearing witness to the passage of time. David Tang had passed away a few days before my visit, but his collection was still handsomely displayed. The club was small and simply incomparable to any Shanghai museums and galleries, especially in comparison to mainland China, where everything is done on a grand scale. Despite that, it gave me a nostalgic glimpse at the memories made over the years and an everlasting sense that it will probably never change. 2018 and Beyond—The Only Constant in Life is Change About a year after Feng’s exhibition, I visited MadeIn Gallery again to see Miao Ying’s exhibition. Shanghai has demonstrated that urbanisation

4

ART DISTRICTS—A REFLECTION ON THE FATE OF CHINESE …

71

happens quickly. In 2017, many sites in the district still looked abandoned. The pace of construction work had accelerated over the previous year. On 19 December 2018, I took a cab from my hotel in Jing’an District to West Bund. As the cab winded its way towards it, the cab driver pointed out the mass of apartment compounds surrounding the West Bund district. The site had been abandoned for years, he told me, and his face was glowing with pride. Since the late 2000s, many residential complexes have begun to develop around the district. In parallel with the initiation of the West Bund development plan, residential properties experienced a significant price appreciation over time. Some of the flats could cost up to 50 million RMB. The handsome new apartment buildings were just about anything Shanghai’s middle classes could desire, but they also served as a reminder that everything came at a cost. After passing the immense apartment complexes, I could see building cranes dotting the skyline from the cab window. Massive construction workers in yellow caps could be seen carrying scaffolding and walking past large and small billboards. On a huge panel to my left was the phrase ‘feel a different Shanghai’, along with taglines such as ‘art’, ‘nature’ and ‘life’. It was a real-estate project initiated by Longhua International, a state-owned enterprise that was jointly funded by the Ministry of Transport and the Xuhui district. In a few years, high-rise twin towers, office buildings and luxury hotels are anticipated to be completed across the 500,000 square metres of land. The World Artificial Intelligence Conference, an annual event on artificial intelligence that began in 2018 and is co-organised by several top government ministries, was advertised on a billboard to my right. The slogan ‘New Era, Shared Future’ was prominently displayed alongside the massive construction sites on every corner of the main road, signalling the grand strategy and national narrative being promoted throughout the country. During the art fair season, the West Bund Art Center is jam-packed with expensive artwork. A month after I visited Shanghai, the warehouse-style exhibition space hosted the artificial intelligence conference, transforming the art venue into a paradise for technology enthusiasts. Even if the anticipated media port, smart valley and financial hub have not yet been constructed, art had already been brought into the picture, inevitably through the purposive or instrumental rationality of the district’s master plan. I got out of the cab in front of the MadeIn Gallery after about 20 minutes. Miao Ying’s exhibition, titled Stones from Other Hills,

72

I. LEUNG

explored ‘the proliferation of experience economy and commodification of lifestyle in a post-materialist society’ (Asia Art Archive in America 2022). Although Miao’s work was highly engaging, the elegantly framed artworks criticising commodification while in a slick gallery space simply seemed to become commodified themselves. Based in New York City and Shanghai, Miao Ying was born in 1985, just as the ‘85 New Wave began to take place. She is famous for her media projects, which include machine learning software, VR and videos. Miao Ying’s exhibition felt like an extension of Feng’s, which I had seen the previous year, except with a meme-like design in place of the revolutionary icons and Mao imagery. Both artists are interested in technology, yet their styles and visual iconographies are recognisably different. I spent around 30 minutes browsing through Miao’s exhibition before going to the souvenir shop next to the MadeIn Gallery that was literally called Xu Zhen. An array of merchandise was neatly displayed, from a t-shirt bearing the slogan ‘Dirty Sex $1’ to a Guan Yin figurine painted in rainbow colours. The gallery and the shop stood side by side. It was comparable to a high-end fashion brand starting a secondary line that retails goods at a lower price. If one is wealthy enough to pay for Miao Ying’s artwork, there were plenty of expensive options available at the gallery on the right. If, however, one is without sufficient funds, the shop on the left is the solution. Both the gallery and the shop provided new opportunities for artists to enter the retail sector and market an artistic way of life to take home. The MainIn Gallery was located on the ground floor of a shopping centre that was part of a real-estate complex comprising residential and office towers. Also housed in the same building are the Edouard Malingue Gallery and the Don Gallery. Aside from the shopping centre’s gallery cluster, which is still expanding, other retail and office spaces are completely occupied by restaurants and businesses in the creative industries. A company called ToMaster was located a few steps away from the galleries. The company, which was co-founded by Liu Quan and Linjie Wang, ‘haigui’ who had studied in the United Kingdom before returning to Shanghai, offered a variety of services, from art consultancy on public art to art derivative products for both public and private agencies. Next to ToMaster was another business that specialised in digital marketing and music production. Given the many new housing developments foreseen to come, a local interior design company and a studio that provides

4

ART DISTRICTS—A REFLECTION ON THE FATE OF CHINESE …

73

family photography services were the ideal solutions for nearby residents who were eager to establish their status through home décor. The neighbourhood was largely deserted the day I visited. The galleries, media agencies, interior design shops and many restaurants were empty. The West Bund masterplan provided a logical explanation—at least from a commonsensical point of view—for the relocation of galleries and lifestyle stores into a new shopping centre located right next to the popular private museums. Although outsiders would never know whether these galleries and companies were viable or not, one thing was certain: within two years, everything seemed caught up in a whirling tornado of change in the neighbourhood. COVID-19 hit Shanghai in early 2020. Since then, the Edouard Malingue Gallery has been shut down. The Don Gallery moved to a new gallery cluster next to Shanghart Gallery. As for the MadeIn Gallery, it moved to One Museum Place, a 60-story office tower and shopping mall located in Jing’an District. In 2022, The West Bund Art Center was converted into a ‘mobile cabin hospital’ with thousands of beds. Perhaps it is a norm in China for things to come quickly and then disappear just as swiftly. While West Bund’s future is unknown, accepting and adapting to change is its constant.

Part 2: Red Town Back in 2010, I lived in an apartment in the Xingguo Building, which is located in the former French Concession district. Ever since the French inhabited Shanghai’s historic structures, the tree-lined streets had trumpeted the city’s prosperity. My building stood opposite Normandy Mansion, one of Shanghai’s most famous colonial buildings and home to numerous celebrities over the years, including the actress Wu Yin. It only took me a few days to discover that I was living in the heart of an artistically rich neighbourhood. Close to my front door was the former Osage Gallery, which had closed down a few months before I moved to Shanghai. Don Gallery, presently situated in the West Bund Art hub, was the building directly across from mine on Huaihai Road. Directly below Xingguo Building was Shanghai Studio, a former bomb shelter turned hip gay bar and art gallery. I later discovered that the bar was opened by my friend Hanspeter Ammann, a Swiss video artist who had worked with Videotage, a non-profit media arts organisation from Hong Kong, since 2000.

74

I. LEUNG

I soon learned that many of my friends from the art world were living nearby. Xu Wenkai, a media artist who founded Xindanwei, resided nearby in an artsy clutch of cafes and galleries called Ferguson Lane. Zhang Lehua, an emerging artist, lived in a small apartment on Yongkang Lu, home to some of Shanghai’s most popular bars. Samantha Culp, a curator and filmmaker originally from Los Angeles, was renting an apartment in a European-style building on Wulumuqi Road. Just a few blocks from my apartment, on Hunan Road, was Jin Shan, a Shanghai-based artist who had exhibited his works extensively in Europe. At night, I often found myself hanging out at a friend’s apartment. I spent at least three nights a week at Zheng Weimin’s place in Hongqiao Leting, a residential complex sitting at the intersection of Hongqiao Road and Panyu Road. Hongqiao Leting—An informal Art Space Hongqiao Leting was typical of the newer apartment buildings at the time, with approximately 20 concrete towers encircling a large communal courtyard. The DDM Warehouse in Red Town, which was Zheng’s art space, was only a short walk away. The bookshelves in Zheng’s living room groaned under the weight of an array of art books, from Taschen’s Art Now to the lifestyle magazine Wallpaper. A few paintings by controversial Danish artist Kristian von Hornsleth were hung on the walls. The dining table was usually adorned with ashtrays and snacks served in Zaha Hadid’s Niche tableware series. I often found myself sitting around that dining table with artists such as Xu Wenkai, Zheng Lehua and other friends from the art world; our ‘informal business meetings’ were held every night over glasses of beer. For artists who had spent the day dealing with mundanities, socialising at Zheng’s apartment was like group therapy. In one session, for instance, Zheng counselled the artist collective Double Fly on how to find a gallery to represent them as they faced an uncertain future. On another occasion, Beijing-based artist Zheng Yunhan lamented the financial hardships of being an artist at length. Even though none of us had any actual solutions, we all commiserated and that was enough. In addition to the gossip-filled dining room and living room, Zheng’s extra bedroom became a temporary space for what we called artists-in-residence, where anyone could crash after rounds of toasting one another. Aside from being Zheng’s home, Hongqiao Leting was also a place where many artists mixed business with pleasure.

4

ART DISTRICTS—A REFLECTION ON THE FATE OF CHINESE …

75

I first met Zheng when I travelled to Shanghai in 2009, and he became one of my closest friends in the Chinese art community. Born in the 1960s, Zheng was among the first generation of contemporary Chinese artists from Shanghai who attended the Shanghai School of Arts & Crafts to study fine art under renowned artists Ding Yi and Yu Youhan. After graduating, Zheng spent four years working in a government-run plastics manufacturing facility. In the years that followed, he established DDM Warehouse, which went on to become one of Shanghai’s few self-run non-profit art galleries. DDM Warehouse was in Red Town on Huaihai West Road, a former steel factory complex that gradually transformed into a trendy art district. Since 2000, DDM Warehouse had presented many alternative exhibitions that countered the commercial flavour of the typical white-cube gallery space. In a country where public art funding was scarce, Zheng’s Warehouse was supported by subletting his art space to several businesses and a local hostel. The idea of running a hostel within a non-profit art space seemed strange to outsiders, but for Zheng, it was a means to an end, and the way he managed his art space blazed a trail in China’s art world. ‘In Shanghai, one can use the street shop selling steamed bun in the morning, turn it into a contemporary art gallery in the afternoon and a massage parlour at night!’ said Zheng one evening over drinks at his apartment. Loosely defined regulations allowed Zheng to fulfil his dream of operating a non-profit art space, but the city’s inconsistent enforcement of those regulations caused its own problems. In 2011, exactly a year after my trip to Shanghai, DDM Warehouse was forced to shut down due to Red Town’s rapidly rising property values. Zheng’s story made me want to learn more about Shanghai’s new wave of art districts. Red Town—An Ever-Expanding Art District A typical day in Shanghai began with coffee at Ferguson Lane on Wukang Road, right behind my apartment building. I usually wandered the former French Concession in the afternoon. Near the Xingguo Building, wellmaintained low-rise buildings from the past were preserved and set aside for upcoming artistic restaurants and shops. A block further on Huaihai West Road, there were clusters of boxy concrete residential towers, indicating that the area’s property market was obviously booming and combining the area’s heritage with a rush of real-estate development.

76

I. LEUNG

On the morning of 20 July 2019, I left my apartment and walked along Huaihai Road towards Red Town. Within 15 minutes, I found myself at the edge of the art district, where a brightly illuminated map delineated the area. The district was divided into four zones. Zone A, comprising roughly 2,500 square metres, was designed to host large-scale outdoor exhibitions. The much larger Zone B included a sculpture museum and various offices. Zones C and H served as commercial spaces for the arts and other cultural industries. In contrast to most artists’ communities I had visited—for example, art district 798 in Beijing—where artists find and develop spaces spontaneously, Red Town felt meticulously manicured and carefully, somewhat constricting, managed. I found a seat on the little patio of Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, a California-based chain café that had gained popularity in China. The café was in Zone B, where the largest factory building had been refurbished into offices, retail shops and a sculpture art centre known as the Shanghai Sculpture Space. The café appeared to attract the most people in the largely desolate district. On the ground floor of the former main factory, next to the café, was a store selling designer furniture, a Thai boxing gym with a wide range of training facilities and a post-production company owned by Hong Kong celebrity Nicolas Tse. After finishing my breakfast at the cafe, I entered the factory building. While its storefronts resembled a typical European street, the building’s interior was flush with factory-style aesthetics from Shanghai’s past. Concrete columns and steel roof trusses designed for a conventional machinery plant supported the factory. The Shanghai Sculpture Space occupied the ground floor while the remaining three floors housed architecture firms, design studios and educational centres. Stylish employees were filling out stacks of paperwork, attending meetings and squinting at computer screens. Instead of feeling like I was in an exhibition space, I briefly mistook myself for a visitor at an office building with an aesthetically ambitious ground-floor lobby. A few steps away from Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf was a modest structure that housed the Vidal Sassoon Academy & Salon. During the peak fashion season, the tree-lined street in Red Town transformed into a runway and models strutted in and out of the salon. Next to Vidal Sassoon was Joyce Warehouse, which specialised in off-season designer clothing. In a standalone building opposite Joyce Warehouse stood Electrolux Design Space, established by a Swedish manufacturer. Inside this studio was an exhibition space, a library and a working kitchen, where

4

ART DISTRICTS—A REFLECTION ON THE FATE OF CHINESE …

77

a chef was giving a cooking demonstration to a couple of well-dressed women. Further up the street from Joyce Warehouse, on the façade of a spacious factory building, a big neon sign read ‘Symrise Creative Center’. This was the regional headquarters of a German company that produced chemical compounds for the food, beverage, fragrance and cosmetic industries. Next door, a seven-storey factory building marked the end of the street, where a Kyoto-based company’s—Shimadzu—research division for precision instruments, measuring instruments and medical equipment was situated. Across from Shimadzu, Leo Burnett, Hoya Academy and other corporations had offices in a smaller building. Zheng Weimin’s DDM Warehouse, which resembled a deserted Soho loft, was just a few feet away. The long street where DDM stood is markedly different from the rest of the district. Paved in grey asphalt, the street was lined with empty lots and older buildings that had the word chai (‘demolish’) spray-painted in bold red characters. Apart from the large neon sign announcing Mao Livehouse—a legendary alternativemusic club in Beijing—I could only see a few construction workers in orange vests crawling on the roofs of the street’s grey brick buildings. At the end of this dark and desolate street, I saw a rusted metal gate with a sign reading ‘Jingsheng Flower Market’. I then realised I was in a xiao qu (which is Chinese for ‘small district’). On the street heaped high with garbage, hawkers sold used books, kitschy decorations, colourful ceramics and rat poison. At exactly 7 p.m., I stood in the shade of a tree where workers napped next to a pile of old bricks left over from a demolition job. Looking at this bustling small district, I realised that while Red Town and Jingsheng Flower Market were both refurbished from the former steel factory, the difference between the two places was significant. Red Town’s success had encouraged the city to redevelop the street which connected the two worlds, forcing DDM Warehouse and Mao Livehouse to close a few months after my trip to Shanghai. I wondered whether Jingsheng Flower Market would experience the same tide of gentrification. If that is the case, what kind of art district is Red Town? Zheng Peiguan—Leveraging Art and the Real-Estate Bubble Red Town was one of the most comprehensive art districts I have visited in China. Along with the site’s history, the vibrant cultural activities there served not only as a strategic spot for various forms of creative enterprise

78

I. LEUNG

but also as a symbol of Shanghai’s historic place in the national economy. After a few visits to Red Town, I scheduled a meeting with its CEO Zheng Peiguang, hoping to learn more about the circumstances surrounding the district’s development. Zheng is a stoutish middle-aged man with short greying hair. Dressed in a blue button-down shirt and black pants, Zheng looked like any wealthy Chinese man perusing a luxury shopping mall. Our conversation began with how the former factories had been transformed into a trendy art district. ‘The plant that was made up of these buildings used to be called the Tenth Steel Plant of Shanghai. The company is now part of the Baosteel Group, the second-largest steel producer in the world, which was founded by Deng Xiaoping’, said Zheng, his hand pointing at the red brick buildings just outside. ‘Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, the Tenth Steel Plant of Shanghai was a very advanced factory, which produced huge numbers of cold-rolled steel strips for the automotive industry. The factory accommodated more than 7,000 workers and it was among the first factories to have a staff canteen with central air-conditioning, which at the time was a luxury’, said Zheng with an air of pride. During the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Shanghai constructed more modern manufacturing facilities than any other city in China. Even outside the context of the Great Leap Forward, the Mao Era saw the construction of several industrial plants, including governmentsupported large-scale infrastructure projects and the expansion of heavy industries such as steel production. In the post-Mao era, steel remained an essential component of the government’s effort to expand its industrial base. In 1979, China’s total steel production reached 34 million tonnes, and Shanghai’s metropolitan area saw the construction of thousands of factories. ‘Besides the staff canteen, there was a fully equipped auditorium that still exists in Red Town’, continued Zheng, his eyes widening. ‘This is where important government officials such as Zhu Rongji, Huang Ju and Wu Bangguo had their meetings on economic policy. It was a brilliant decade for the factory’. During an era when the state controlled the economy, the Tenth Steel Plant’s edifice fulfilled dual roles as a steel production factory and a venue for political decision-making. ‘The market competitiveness of the steel plant in the city faced decline with the deeper reform and opening up of China after the 1990s’, stated Zheng. While I was wondering why, Zheng explained, ‘First of all, the state-owned enterprise system was challenged when several steel plants

4

ART DISTRICTS—A REFLECTION ON THE FATE OF CHINESE …

79

underwent privatisation and the Tenth Steel Plant could not sustain itself by using the old system. Second, the expansion of the surrounding township enterprises in Shanghai caused an outflow of skilled individuals who moved on to careers in other disciplines. By the time the plant closed in 1995, 4,000 workers had already left the company’. When I asked Zheng where the remaining 3,000 employees went after the plant was permanently closed, he informed me that the laid-off workers received a monthly stipend funded by the 20 million RMB annual rental fees paid by Zheng’s company for the use of the buildings. My mind was drawn to the district’s business model by this intriguing strategy for regenerating the neighbourhood’s businesses and sustaining its former employees. When I asked Zheng how he wrested control of the land from the city, he cited a model he called ‘people invest and the government subsidises’, which aimed to support the creative industries by having private companies lead the development of cultural projects and funding them in tandem with public subsidies. He went on to say that the Shanghai Urban Planning Administration Bureau invited different parties to bid for the right to invest in this land in September 2004. Zheng appeared to be committed to a long-term investment given that the factory buildings needed significant renovation and the district as a whole demanded at least 12 million RMB annually for maintenance and cultural programming. Furthermore, this art district was initiated by the city, and during the first three years of operation, only 4.5 million RMB was provided from public funds, followed by 1 million RMB annually in the subsequent years. Zheng’s massive capital investment piqued my interest in his background even more. As it happens, Zheng has spent his entire career at the nexus of art and real estate. Zheng was born in 1963. During his college years at the Shanghai Drama Institute in 1981, he studied with artists including Cai Guo-Qiang, who later rose to fame internationally. ‘In the early 1990s, I was invited to work for a fraternal organisation founded by Xinhua’s branch in Hong Kong. Around that time, I started to oversee cultural exchange programmes between mainland China and Hong Kong’, said Zheng, his forehead furrowing slightly. ‘Since I majored in performance, I was very familiar with the fraternal organisation’s theatre initiatives. In addition to the cultural exchange projects, I was asked to participate in real-estate projects in Shanghai and Fujian, so I learned about the real estate industry’.

80

I. LEUNG

Before the turn of the millennium, Shanghai’s real-estate bubble saw the partial completion and abandonment of many ambitious new buildings. Though it was a challenging time for many real-estate developers, Zheng saw an opportunity to complete these unfinished buildings, and this approach was the foundation of his financial success. ‘I left the fraternal organisation in 2000 and moved back to Shanghai. In collaboration with Tongji University, I initiated Tongji Science and Technology, a listed company that took the lead in establishing a fund for the redevelopment of old buildings in Shanghai’. The financial success of several real-estate ventures provided Zheng with the capital he needed to undertake bigger projects like Red Town. ‘It looks to me that a significant proportion of the district is made up of retail and office spaces’, I ventured. ‘Was that part of the district’s original plan?’ ‘We strive for a balance between artistic and commercial spaces’, Zheng responded delicately. ‘The city originally planned to use 20 per cent of the land for commercial space, but we’ve had to slightly increase that percentage’. To highlight the value of the district’s multi-purpose spaces, Zheng compared the art gallery at Red Town to a cinema in a shopping mall. According to him, nobody would visit a standalone cinema that was not surrounded by other retail services. ‘After shopping, they go to see our exhibitions. It’s very interactive’.

Minsheng Art Museum—No Answer is also an Answer Even though office workers and shoppers predominated over practising artists, Red Town became my favourite spot to spend an afternoon in Shanghai. There was little doubt that artists had their moments in Red Town, particularly at Minsheng Art Museum’s exhibition opening parties. The first public non-profit organisation founded by a financial institution in mainland China, the museum was sponsored by Minsheng Banking Corporation—which acquired the Yan-huang Art Museum in Beijing in 2007. In the Western art world, major banks such as UBS and Deutsche Bank have long supported the arts, but it was rare for a bank to establish and operate a museum before assembling a collection. Although the Minsheng Art Museum opened without so much as a publicly available mission statement, strategic plan or collection policy, it was the hottest topic of

4

ART DISTRICTS—A REFLECTION ON THE FATE OF CHINESE …

81

conversation in Shanghai’s art scene that summer. A week after I settled in Shanghai, I emailed the senior management of the Minsheng Art Museum, in the hope of obtaining some first-hand information about the somewhat enigmatic institution that relied on the support of a commercial bank. Email is an unreliable way to schedule a meeting in China, especially when you do not have an existing guanxi, or relationship, with the person you want to contact. After trying, the senior management by email, I asked my friend to make a personal call and see if she could arrange an interview for me. As I had hoped, guanxi did the trick and the senior management replied promptly. On 3 July, at 2 p.m., I found myself seated on a long bench in the museum’s partially open patio. The senior management was a stoutish man of approximately 40 years old who typically wore a polo shirt and baggy pants. After a brief introduction, I switched on my voice recorder and asked him to speak so I could adjust the recording level. ‘Can you give me a brief introduction of yourself?’ I prompted him. ‘Ha…no way to introduce…haha…no way to introduce’, replied him with a slight curl of his upper lip. While I was half-surprised by his response, I continued, ‘As one of the most important artists in China, I was wondering if you could share any anecdotes about the art world in the 80s?’ ‘Are you referring to my personal stories?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I would like to hear some of your personal experiences’. He paused for a moment before answering indifferently, ‘I don’t talk about my personal stories’. Under normal circumstances, a person would decline the request if they did not wish to be interviewed. I found it a bit odd at the time that he was sitting in front of me but showing reluctance to respond. ‘Then…by that time…during the 80s…’ I was trying to come up with another way to probe him into opening up. ‘Are you talking about the market?’ he interrupted. ‘Sure…and also there were a lot of art spaces by that time, for example…’ ‘I’ve forgotten’, he exclaimed. ‘It was too long ago’. … ‘Do you have any thoughts on how this art district might evolve in the future?’ ‘No, I don’t’, he responded frostily.

82

I. LEUNG

After a 20-minute Sisyphean attempt to engage him in a straightforward conversation, I offered my hand and we shook to conclude the interview. As I watched him leave the patio, I could not help but wonder why he had been so reluctant to speak after agreeing so breezily to meet me. The story of my interview came up a few times when I saw his friends on different occasions. ‘It’s quite normal…He probably doesn’t even know what’s going on with the museum’s collection. Of course, he won’t answer you’. ‘He just wants to give mianzi [which literally translates to ‘face’] to my friend’, opined another acquaintance. ‘He didn’t want to do the interview from the very beginning’.

In contrast to the West, where art institutions usually have a public mandate to maintain a certain amount of transparency, obscurity seemed to be the norm for China’s museum bureaucracy. Perhaps the senior management’s unwillingness to discuss his personal history and the rhetorical tone of his response hinted at the conflicting nature between his current professional role and his past as an artist. By staying mum about the museum’s past and future as well as his own, his response reminded me of the famous German proverb, keine Antwort ist auch eine Antwort: ‘No answer is also an answer’. On 8 September 2011, I attended the opening party of Moving Image in China (1988–2011), the second instalment of Thirty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art, where I saw every contemporary Chinese artist, art dealer, curator, critic and collector I could name. That evening at 6.30 p.m., familiar faces began to pour into the museum. The entryway became a place for the power players to see and be seen. ‘Long time no see’, said the deputy director as he patted Qiu Zhejie’s shoulder with one hand and hugged his chest with the other. ‘Welcome’. The steps in front of the entrance resembled the ones used by actors to access the stage area in theatres. Standing at the door, I felt like a reporter studying the silent language of a politician’s hand movements, posture, facial expressions and eye contact, all of them alluding to deeper meanings. The officials of the museum greeted the VIPs with a handshake and a hug; those who entered to less fanfare were at the bottom of the list. While the officials of the museum were on the lookout for favoured guests, the entrance hall itself was another arena of power and prestige.

4

ART DISTRICTS—A REFLECTION ON THE FATE OF CHINESE …

83

In front of the entrance hall’s backdrop that announced the exhibition stood a camera and microphone. Pioneering artists such as Zhang Peili and star curators such as Victoria Lu were surrounded by reporters as if they were walking an unseen red carpet. ‘See, Zhang Peili’s work is placed at the exhibition’s entrance’, said an art critic friend from Shanghai while pointing at 30 × 30, a 1991 video that featured Zhang’s famous latex gloves. ‘In this kind of historical exhibition, the work’s size and placement have significant symbolic connotations. Chinese artists can be very stingy and jealous about these things so it’s the curator’s job to keep everyone happy’, he chuckled. Producing a historical exhibition required meticulous labour because every little detail reflected each artist’s status in the art world. An established artist once informed me in his studio that he was the first person in China to use video as an artistic medium, not bothering to disguise his distaste for Zhang Peili’s title, ‘The Father of Chinese Video Art’, which was coined by art historians and curators. China’s art world is surprisingly parochial and an artist’s standing in the larger artistic community depends on their place of origin, their place of education and their gallery. At 7:30 p.m., after a quick survey of the tastefully themed galleries, I followed my art critic friend to the party room where wine, juice and canapés were being served. The party room was the only place where attendees could properly mingle because the majority of the video pieces were presented in dark exhibition rooms, which prohibited much socialising. In one of the room’s corners, I noticed a curator from Hong Kong chatting with the dealer of Zhang Peili’s work, Waling Boers. In another corner, I spotted Lorenz Helbling, the godfather of the Shanghai art world, who represented more than 10 of the exhibition’s artists. As is typical of Chinese museum openings, everyone was affiliated with someone, and the opening party was an opportunity for established artists to affirm their continued influence. Outside, on the grassy museum grounds, I saw the artist collective Double Fly, whose members were all students of Zhang Peili at the China Academy of Art. Despite their slouching discomfort with the established world, their attendance at the opening party was strong evidence of Zhang’s standing. At 8.00 p.m., when the exhibition’s luminaries were ready to board the bus that would take them to the evening’s formal dinner, I ran into Zheng Weimin. ‘Are you going to the dinner?’ I asked.

84

I. LEUNG

‘No, no’, Zheng answered as he wrinkled his nose and pursed his lips. ‘Let’s have dinner at our usual place’. After the opening party’s feeding frenzy, I had dinner with Zheng and a few curator and artist friends at Shouning Road, a side street famous for its late-night food. ‘I’m glad I’m not affiliated with anyone since I’m working on an online database right now. I don’t like going to the opening dinners’, Zheng said over his Tsingtao beer. I thought about what a contrast my night had been as it came to an end. While the art-themed restaurants in Red Town catered to executives from the surrounding offices, my artist friends preferred to grab a bite on the less fashionable streets they knew better. In this rapidly gentrifying country, mom-and-pop enterprises are constantly pushed aside by large real-estate developments. A few months ago, I heard that Zheng Peiguang’s company was in the process of redeveloping a couple of districts across China; these included Peninsula 1919, Xinhua Road Shanghai Cultural Circle and a few projects in Tianjin and Jiangyin. As for Red Town, another renowned coffee shop, Sculpting in Time, recently opened next to Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. 2018 and Beyond—Development is the Truth A year before my winter trip to Shanghai in 2018, Red Town announced its plans to close and demolish most of the buildings, forcing more than 80 tenants to leave. According to a report from Xinhua News, Red Town’s land was acquired by Zheng’s company for 1.476 billion RMB back in 2014. Later that year, a Fujian real-estate firm named Rongqiao Group made a bid for the land for 2.746 billion RMB (Xu 2017). In a press conference hosted by the real-estate company in 2017, a new ‘culturally themed commercial office complex’ focused on ‘business’, ‘cultural tourism’ and ‘life’ with a ‘people-oriented’ philosophy would be established in a few years (Zhou 2017). Back in 2017, some of the district’s early tenants had already moved out one after another. Dashe Architectural Design Office, which participated in the planning and design of the district, had relocated to West Bund. Minsheng Art Museum, which used to feature a lot of benchmarking exhibitions, also suffered the same fate as many other locations under the tabula rasa–style demolitions in China’s cities. After the demolition of Red Town, the museum was then moved to the former French Pavilion of the World Expo site in 2014. The former expo site’s redevelopment has resulted in the museum having to relocate

4

ART DISTRICTS—A REFLECTION ON THE FATE OF CHINESE …

85

again. Until 2019, the museum had officially settled in the Jing’an district. During my trip in 2018, I visited the remnants of both Red Town and the Minsheng Art Museum. Seeing the sites covered in overgrown grass and wrapped by fences, it was somewhat difficult to believe that the vibrant activities at these locations had come to an end. For better or worse, there is perhaps no other city in the world where art districts and museums have grown so quickly in such a short period. Deng Xiaoping once said, ‘Development is the truth’. There is no question that everything is part of the scheme, and art is no exception.

Conclusion Above, I illustrated how the complex and ever-evolving narratives of contemporary Chinese art intersected in many distinct locations and eras. Normally, the story of art does not consider social locations and cultural practices. This chapter’s ethnographic texts seek to reveal the underlying knowledge structures that imposed limits on concrete practices in specific locations at specific times. Prior to the 2000s, when mainland China’s art infrastructure was largely absent, the spatial historical trajectories of Feng show that works of contemporary Chinese art were only ever exhibited at foreign museums (the Center Pompidou) and galleries in Hong Kong (Hanart TZ Gallery). Early in the 1990s, Hong Kong’s established market infrastructure, workforce and legal system presented itself as potential as a mediator and offshore location of contemporary Chinese art. Since the 2000s, activities including exhibition, collection and trading were dispersed among various types of new locations alongside the emergence of galleries, museums and, later, art districts. As contemporary Chinese art became more widely institutionalised, the dispersion of art activities from the West and Hong Kong to cities in mainland China created multiple diverse relations between private collectors, real estate-companies and business owners. The movement of artwork between locations also opened new ground for individuals in various professions, who in turn constantly respond, adapt and reinvent Shanghai’s art world. In the aforementioned stories, no matter the former French Confession Area, M50, Red Town, the former World Expo site and West Bund, various art districts that emerged at different times were conscientiously arranged to produce distinct spatial activities in a formulaic set of relations. The former French Confession Area witnessed art being

86

I. LEUNG

sporadically produced and traded at several of its locations. Before the emergence of increasingly sophisticated channels of art distribution in art districts, events took place at Xu Wenkai’s Xindanwei, Zheng Weimin’s apartment, Don Gallery, BizArt and many other locations. By leveraging the nearby art facilities, M50 gave galleries like Shangart and Bizart additional opportunities to grow. Contemporary Chinese art was able to disperse, dispute and renew itself in the new economic and social space thanks to fresh organisational and spatial configurations. Thus, the niche provided in Hong Kong and the West was increasingly regarded as being less important for practitioners in China. The success of M50 was followed by Red Town, which further integrated art with diverse creative businesses ranging from a film post-production company and a fashion outlet to an advertising agency. Red Town’s unique architecture and spatial settings offered new modes of activities, expanding the boundaries and ecosystem of the art world. As for the former World Expo site and West Bund, they are part of the ‘Comprehensive Development Plan for Both Sides of the Huangpu River’, which aligns with the city-wide endeavour and national agenda of positioning Shanghai as a cultural, technological and financial hub. Apart from galleries such as Shanghart, MadeIn Gallery and Don Gallery relocating from the aforementioned art districts to West Bund, the district is also a hub for billionaire collectors, blue-chip gallerists, multinational corporations and foreign ministries visiting Shanghai. The media agencies, technology conferences and various types of offices in the shopping centre of West Bund play a further role in integrating China’s domestic business with global markets. The transformation of cultural capital into economic capital is made possible through art. Though the various art districts in the aforementioned stories have varying sizes and shapes, they are largely mediated by cultural policy and real-estate investment. The city plays a particularly important role in influencing new lifestyles through private real-estate-cum-art projects under the new land use and cultural policies in the last decade. The development and demolition of various art districts demonstrate the continued effectiveness of top-down flows of power. Contemporary Chinese art continues to be instrumental in the wider power structure. The stories in this chapter highlight how different types of art spaces are constantly moving and transforming, while others disappear throughout urban development that is primarily shaped by the pursuit of commercial and industrial interests.

4

ART DISTRICTS—A REFLECTION ON THE FATE OF CHINESE …

87

Overall, this chapter’s personal and socio-institutional relations specific to particular locations and moments demonstrate how certain art districts have shaped contemporary Chinese art while adhering to the country’s logic of a market-driven economy. The success of different art districts can also be seen at the beginning of the end.

References Asia Art Archive in America. 2022. Miao Ying: A field guide to ideology. https:// www.aaa-a.org/events/miao-ying-a-field-guide-to-ideology. Accessed 22 Oct 2022. Centre Pompidou. n.d. Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum Project https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/the-centre-pompidou/int Shanghai. ernational-offers/centre-pompidou-x-west-bund-museum-project-shanghai. Accessed 22 Oct 2022. Devi, Reena. 2021. Strong interest from major local museums, private collection owners, and young collectors at Shanghai’s West Bund Art & Design in 2021. COBO Social, November 18. https://www.cobosocial.com/dossiers/art/str ong-interest-at-shanghai-west-bund-art-design-in-2021/. Hu, Richard, and Weijie Chen. 2020. Planning greater Shanghai. Essay. In Global Shanghai remade: The rise of Pudong New Area, 97. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge. Liu, Dong. 2017. Pursuing a dream in the West Bund of Shanghai. China Today, January 17. http://www.chinatoday.com.cn/ctenglish/2018/et/202 001/t20200117_800190186.html. Pollack, Barbara. 2016. From palace to tank: Art collector Qiao Zhibing is parlaying his Shanghai karaoke club into a museum-cum-recreation-space. ARTnews, September 7. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/from-pal ace-to-tank-art-collector-qiao-zhibing-is-parlaying-his-shanghai-karaoke-clubinto-a-museum-cum-recreation-space-6912/. Southern Weekly. 2015. Is Zhang Songren a pickpocket covered in the artist’s blood, or an international promoter of contemporary Chinese art? Southern Weekly.https://kknews.cc/zh-hk/culture/r5nbbx.html. West Bund. n.d.a District overview. http://www.westbund.com/en/index/ ABOUT-WEST-BUND/Area-Overview/District-Overview.html. Accessed 22 Oct 2022. West Bund. n.d.b West Bund history. http://www.westbund.com/en/index/ ABOUT-WEST-BUND/History/West-Bund-History.html. Accessed 22 Oct 2022.

88

I. LEUNG

Xu, Qiao. 2017. Shanghai Red Town starts construction in July to build a cultural, commercial and office complex. Xinhuanet, April 11. http://m.xin huanet.com/2017-04/11/c_136198398.htm. Accessed 22 Oct 2022. Zhou, Song Ping. 2017. Shanghai’s cultural landmark Red Square will be gone! Exclusively revealing the future destiny of Red Town. Linkshop, April 11. http://www.linkshop.com/news/2017374716.shtml.

CHAPTER 5

Commercial Gallery—A Reinvention of Self in the ‘Charismatic-Networked Game’

This chapter maps different types of art spaces in Shanghai, including Shanghart Gallery (hereafter Shanghart), Xu Zhen’s studio, the Shanghai Gallery of Art (SGA) and the Vanguard Gallery. Through careful analysis of galleries and artists’ studios, I intend to shed light on how new art locations open new spaces of consumption, new modes of gallery operation and new forms of agency. The first section of this chapter discusses Shanghart and Xu Zhen. Shanghart is one of the most important galleries in China. The gallery’s history has both mirrored and contributed to the profound transformation that China’s contemporary art scene has undergone in recent decades. In the 1990s, the term ‘gallery’ was unknown to most people in Shanghai. Shanghart’s owner, Lorenz Helbling, sporadically acquired artwork and sold it at semi-public spaces such as hotels, restaurants and parks. The relocation of his original pop-up enterprise to M50—a successful art district run by state-owned company Shangtex—witnessed an organisational shift from ad hoc art production to a more deliberately structured production chain in the early 2000s. I also present a thorough study of Xu Zhen, a successful artist who collaborates with art professionals and inexpensive labourers to mass-produce art. From his early days as the director of BizArt, Shanghai’s first experimental art space,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I. Leung, Tracing Contemporary Chinese Art, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2668-8_5

89

90

I. LEUNG

to his current role as an artist-entrepreneur, Xu Zhen brands himself as a unique artist who strives to create new avenues for artists to thrive. The second part of this chapter examines SGA, an established gallery with a unique market model, and Vanguard Gallery, a smaller gallery that focuses on promoting emerging artists. A Singapore-based investment firm’s subsidiary, SGA enjoys a premium location along the Bund at Three. It is a striking example of a ‘vertical art complex’, where the gallery’s advantageous position fosters a complex web of interdependencies among other hospitality businesses housed in the same building. In contrast, Vanguard Gallery is owned by Lise Li, a former banker in Shenzhen with limited financial resources but a seemingly boundless passion for art. Li started her first exhibition in 2005 and is recognised as a relatively latecomer to the Shanghai art world. Instead of exhibiting pieces that represent the Post-Cultural Revolution period, Li has positioned her gallery as a champion of novel artistic directions, showcasing young artists who explore new artistic styles inspired by—some may say required by—China’s rapid transformation. Drawing on my numerous visits to these art spaces, this chapter examines how diverse forms of art spaces construct a complex network among various actors towards cooperative gains. By illustrating how various entities engage in art-related activities, adopt new skills and create artistic and economic value, this chapter investigates how the web of relationships within Shanghai’s art scene is constantly developing and evolving.

Part 1: Shanghart and Xu Zhen’s Studio---Cooperation Emerged in Multilayer Networks My first month in Shanghai was spent mainly in the city centre, where I frequented the Xuhui, Jing’an and Huangpu districts. On 25 July 2009, I visited Shanghart’s new branch in Taopu Village.1 As soon as I got off the train at Liziyuan Station, the contrast between Taopu and my usual Shanghai haunts in the city centre was unmistakable; instead of the French Concession’s tree-lined streets, there were auto repair shops, tobacco stores and quick-dining restaurants. In front of the gloomy storefront windows, I observed a man selling watermelons from a flatbed cargo 1 An industrial area between the middle and outer ring roads in Putuo District.

5

COMMERCIAL GALLERY—A REINVENTION OF SELF …

91

tricycle while wearing a poncho he had constructed out of trash bags. On the opposite side of the street, a hunchbacked elderly woman was pulling a cart loaded with live chickens in cages. The road itself teemed with garbage bags mounted on the back of scooters and the vista was foreshortened by a veil of grey smoke discharged by the procession of poorly maintained vehicles. In 2006, during China’s Twelfth Five-Year Plan, Taopu Village was designated as a municipal industrial zone and massive stretches of its agricultural land were converted into factories. Served by new highways and road systems courtesy of a national investment of RMB 10 billion in transportation infrastructure, the village was envisioned to be one of Shanghai’s most important logistics and manufacturing hubs. For the next seven years, infrastructure systems were built at a scale and pace never seen before, though many proposed business developments were never fully realised. Instead of serving its intended purpose, Taopu became a classic example of ‘a village inside a city’, where vacant buildings were transformed into private rental properties and dormitories to accommodate the rapidly expanding numbers of migrant workers. Shanghart—Urban–Rural Divide in Art Production and Consumption At 11 a.m., I found myself in front of a security guard at Taopu Creative Park’s entrance. The newly developed art district was regarded as the second edition of M50 on Moganshan Road. Taopu Creative Park had opened a month earlier by state-owned enterprise Shangtex, taking its cue from the successful conversion of defunct factory buildings into galleries and artist’s studios elsewhere. Upon entering, I was greeted by a structure with white tiles and boarded-up windows. Across the building and to the west stood a two-storey building painted ruby red by exhibition designer Margo Renisio.2 Shanghart was a large warehouse sprinkled with the artwork. An overhead door at the gallery’s entrance made it easy to move and discard huge pieces of art. The walls of the warehouse were polished and painted lily white, but the interior still had an industrial aesthetic. Walking through the warehouse’s numerous masterpieces by artists whose work I had read

2 A French exhibition designer who worked for Shanghai Biennale.

92

I. LEUNG

about but never seen in person gave the fortress-like space a feeling of being like a tour of contemporary Chinese art history. Xu’s dissected dinosaurs in formaldehyde nodded to Damien Hirst; other highlights included Yang Fudong’s Blue Kyli, which had been exhibited at the Asia Society in New York, and Wang Guangyi’s the Materialist, whose other editions had been collected by Museu Berardo in Spain. While Shanghart at Taopu reminded me of the collectors’ homes and warehouses I had visited in Basel, the most noticeable difference was the lack of climate control. Shanghart was also lacking other security equipment deemed necessary elsewhere, such as smoke detectors. After walking for a few minutes in the non-air-conditioned space, I viewed the remaining artworks through rivulets of my sweat. I was admiring Zhang Ding’s installation Law when Helbling, in his pronounced European accent, said, ‘Nice to meet you’. Helbling, who was in his mid-forties, was neatly dressed and his steel-rimmed glasses matched his wavy salt-and-pepper hair. Known as the owner of one of China’s most respected galleries, Helbling was a luminary of the Chinese art world; in a previous edition of L’Officiel Magazine’ s annual ‘Art Power 100’, he once placed third behind Ai Weiwei and Uli Sigg.3 After a short exchange of greetings, Helbling led me to a storage room. ‘Do you mind if we conduct the interview here?’ asked Helbling politely. As I absentmindedly nodded my head, Helbling fetched a round stool and set it in front of the installation. Instead of conducting my interview in his office, Helbling preferred to have his artist’s work recorded on camera. ‘Does it look all right?’ he asked as he adjusted the stool’s position. Standing in front of a collection of miniature-sized wooden buildings inspired by Danwei,4 Helbling could as well have been a retired comic-book superhero. Helbling Added, ‘I lived in Hong Kong for a while’ as I set up my tripod. ‘I spent a few years there in the early 1990s and I decided to come back to Shanghai in the middle of that decade’. Helbling started his career while he was a student in China, just like many other foreigners in China’s art scene, such as Philip Tinari, Biljana

3 One of the most prominent collectors of contemporary Chinese art. 4 The name given to one’s place of employment in the context of state-owned enter-

prises in China. Shi’s installation was inspired by the work unit in Inner Mongolia, where he grew up.

5

COMMERCIAL GALLERY—A REINVENTION OF SELF …

93

Ciric5 and Lee Ambrozy.6 ‘Back in 1985, I submitted an application to the University of Zurich for an exchange programme to China. I could not choose which Chinese university to apply to, so I was assigned to study at Fudan University’, he smiled. ‘I studied history my first year at Fudan. After the exchange programme, I moved back to Switzerland to finish my studies. Then I went to Hong Kong in 1992’. Helbling developed a keen interest in Chinese cinema in the 1980s. After moving to Hong Kong in 1992, he witnessed the drastic decline of the Hong Kong film industry because of competition from karaoke bars and other emerging forms of entertainment. Helbling began to feel less enthused by films but more intrigued by other forms of consumer culture. While seeking employment in the film industry, he decided to look for a job at the Asian Art Fairs7 at the Convention and Exhibition Centre in 1992. ‘Eventually, I got a job at Plum Blossoms Gallery. I didn’t have any experience working in a gallery; I didn’t even know how heavy a painting was or how to hang it. It was a good experience for me to work in the gallery…’. ‘I remember I first saw contemporary Chinese art exhibitions when I moved to Hong Kong in 1992, but by 1994 or 1995 it was already too expensive’. Helbling continued, ‘The art gallerists strongly believed that selling contemporary Chinese art can result in quick financial success…though I felt that the gallery I worked at was a bit too serious. The pieces represented were not very modern and they often worked with artists over a long period of time’. After leaving Hong Kong, Helbling decided to use his recent experience to open his own gallery in Shanghai. ‘At first, I thought about

5 One of the most important independent curators in Shanghai, Ciric graduated from East China Normal University in Shanghai with an M.A. in Art History and has worked extensively as a curator in China and abroad. Her notable projects include the major retrospective of Yoko Ono at Ke Center for Contemporary Art and Guangdong Museum of Art. 6 The editor of Artforum’s Chinese-language website by then, Ambrozy studied Chinese at Peking University in 2004 and received her M.A. in Chinese Art History from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Since then, she has resided in Beijing. Her first major work in translation, Ai Weiwei’s Blog (March 2011), was published by MIT Press in the spring of 2011. 7 The former Art HK.

94

I. LEUNG

renting a space in Shanghai. I didn’t have enough money and it was difficult to set up a gallery in China. The market size seemed too small to me. Then I thought about those empty spaces and hallways in hotels’, he recalled. In the early 1990s, the very concept of a contemporary art gallery was all but unknown in Shanghai. Brian Wallace, an Australian dealer, founded Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, which may have been the nearest gallery with any sort of profile. Finding it difficult to open a gallery in such conditions, Helbling came up with the idea of selling art in a foreignfunded hotel. Apart from saving rental fees, he was also able to sidestep the legal complications of opening a commercial gallery in Shanghai and the controversy that often accompanies displays of contemporary art. ‘The hotel I worked with was Portman Shangri-La Hotel. The owner had been in China for a long time and he liked art a lot, so we thought it was a good idea to sell art in the hotel’, he continued. Seeing Shanghart in all its glory, it was difficult to imagine how modest the gallery must have been at first. ‘It was like RMB 2,000 a month was enough to live and to have the gallery’, Helbling recalled, ‘so it was not a time to think about where to get money to survive. I didn’t have to pay rent and I was able to survive by selling art at the hotel’. ‘There were some foreigners in Shanghai at the time who were familiar with Chinese artists. For example, during the first exhibition, I sold some pieces to a foreign collector who was living in Shanghai. These pieces were created by an artist who was already well known in Hong Kong and the collector was familiar with their work. Actually, by that time, even selling one piece of work per month would have made us very happy. If an artist sold their work successfully, they would invite all their friends and have a great party; money was not really an issue’. Helbling’s gallery benefited from a steady stream of clients drawn by the Portman Shangri-La Hotel, all but eliminating the need for marketing or advertising. ‘The hotel used to be a hub of traffic. The hotel was full of foreign airline crews and journalists; maybe it was frequented by consulates. In other words, many foreigners who came to Shanghai had to stop by the Portman. Sometimes I saw young Chinese people visiting Shanghai staying at the hotel. It was a good place for me to sell art because it was open from 10 to 10 and seven days a week’, said Helbling with a smile on his face. Although his dream had materialised with remarkable ease, life did not always unfold as smoothly. In 1998, the Ritz-Carlton took over the

5

COMMERCIAL GALLERY—A REINVENTION OF SELF …

95

hotel’s management and Helbling was forced to leave. ‘Of course, it was sad, but after three years in the hotel, I started to become a little weary and thought I had had enough. By that time, I knew some people from Park 978 at Fuxing Park, so I began to hang some of my pieces there. The warehouse was a bit like here now, then it became more and more popular and crowded. I was asked to leave once more after staying there for seven years because a disco had decided to take over the space’. While moving from a hotel hallway to a park represented a significant change for Helbling, he was still able to benefit from a steady flow of expatriates. After leaving Fuxing Park in 1999, he took advantage of the low rent on a disused industrial space at M50, where he played a vital role in the success of the area’s art district. ‘Many artists in Beijing have moved there from other provinces like Sichuan’, he said. ‘They usually stay together to build their own community and network. In Shanghai, artists are far more independent. Everybody kind of knows each other but not really. Since they are all Shanghai natives, they usually don’t need that bonding or sense of community. When M50 was opened…many artists suddenly felt much closer to each other, both physically and emotionally’. During Shanghai’s heyday in the nineteenth century, national capitalists Rong Zongjing9 and Rong Desheng10 transformed Moganshan Road into the city’s largest industrial area, which is how the current popular art district got its start. In 1933, entrepreneur Zhou Zhijun11 of the modern-day Hui Group12 founded the Xinhe Cotton Mill, the

8 Opened by the Lan Kwai Fong Restaurant Group, Muse at Park 97 housed a few

popular restaurants and bars such as Baci Italian Restaurant, Tokio Joe Restaurant and California Club, all of which originated in Hong Kong. 9 Known as the ‘King of Flour’ and the ‘King of Cotton’, Rong Zongjing once served

in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry of the Nanjing National Government as the director of Central Bank and as a member of the National Economic Council. During the Sino-Japanese War, Rong participated in the Association of the People of Shanghai, and later fled to Hong Kong. 10 Rong Desheng served as a committee member of the People’s Political Consultative Conference, the deputy director of the East China Military and Political Committee and an official in the Southern Suzhou Civil Administration. He was one of the few capitalists who remained in mainland China after the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949. 11 Zhou Zhijun’s father was Zhou Xuexi, who was the Finance Minister of Yuan Shikai’s government. 12 The representative of the merchants from Huizhou prefecture.

96

I. LEUNG

Xinfu Dying Factory and the Xinyi Machinery Factory. These structures currently house many of the district’s galleries and artist studios. The industrial complex on Moganshan Road served as the strategic spot for the textile manufacturing industry along Suzhou River and the success of its factories symbolised a glorious moment for the national economy. After the Chinese Civil War, the former textile business established by Zhou’s family was renamed the Chunming Spinning Factory. Along with the massive restructuring and privatisation of state-owned and collectiveowned factories, the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information oversaw the renovation of the factory buildings and their subsequent leasing to galleries and artists starting in 1999. ‘I think it’s a very organic thing and that’s why it has a very unique position’, Helbling reflected. ‘It’s funny…perhaps M50 wasn’t a well-planned district from the start. The developer didn’t make a lot of renovations and it wasn’t intended to be developed as a “creative industry” there, which would cost a fortune! Most artists don’t need fancy locations and young artists can’t afford high rents unless they become famous’. Xue Song was among the first artists to settle in the area at the time the art district was established. Soon after, artists such as Ding Yi, Qu Fengguo and Wang Xingwei began to set up their studios at the rehabilitated textile warehouse. ‘Since there was no planning at M50 at first, we considered staying there for a year until they destroyed it. After a while, the developer thought that perhaps they didn’t have to destroy it and it could instead be developed as a kind of creative space. Then everyone was more passionate about M50’. By now, the hybrid model of ‘state capitalism’—in which state-owned enterprises are also publicly listed—was in the spotlight. This unique model also influenced the art world. ‘M50 has a very unique model, perhaps even in China’, Helbling noted. ‘It would have been a totally different story if a fully private or state-run enterprise had occupied the factory buildings. I think M50 is interesting because it’s neither a private space nor a government-run space; it’s unconventionally something in between. A company between the public and private sectors is responsible for the management of the art district. It is a strange thing, yet it gradually gains flexibility. For instance, in the [United] States, who makes the canvas and who packs the artwork is clearly defined. Although the system here is probably not the same as in the West, there are a lot of interesting things happening. We can see how New York was impacted by

5

COMMERCIAL GALLERY—A REINVENTION OF SELF …

97

the Parisian system. I suppose that whatever we see in Paris, Europe and New York has an influence in China’. M50’s success prompted Shangtex to refurbish its former blanket factory (built in the 1980s) into a centre of art production in Taopu.13 When I asked Helbling about why he had decided to rent the big warehouse space for his gallery, he conceded, ‘A lot of things I do have not really been planned. Our move from the hotel to Fuxing Park to here is always a kind of push and pull. We started a new 3,000-m2 space this year. It was completely unplanned and it doesn’t make sense…I think artists genuinely want a long-term contract with a location that offers excellent conditions. Take M50 for instance, everybody is very excited to have their own space to work. It makes a lot of sense to come here to have a bigger space and I think it can work’. Shanghart’s press release for the opening of the Taopu branch claimed that it was the first warehouse-style art museum in China. When I questioned Helbling about the use of his space, he said, ‘I don’t know, we’ll see. It’s for storage; we have all these things that need space. We did not have so many things at first. Now we have a lot and it’s good to display them to the public…for example, these things were in the Guangzhou Triennial three years ago. People are thrilled to see these kinds of historical items. Even though Taopu had its official opening three days ago, the space was not really open to the public. So I’m not sure how to clearly define this space…we don’t want to recreate the exhibition space because it’ll cost too much money. But perhaps this storage area can somehow describe what the piece was’. I made it a point to stop by Taopu Creative Park every time I was in Shanghai. Apart from the park’s grand opening in October 2010, the place was usually deserted. Even though visitors were largely absent in Taopu, the district received a lot of media attention and was chosen by Wendi Deng Murdoch to shoot a scene there for her film Snow Flower and the Secret Fan in 2011. As I walked back to Liziyuan Station after my meeting with Helbling, I thought about how well Shanghart had structured its production across the different stages of its evolution. Back in the 1990s, Helbling used 13 Phoenix Woolen Blanket Factory was founded in 1922 by merchant Lupei Zhi. During 1937, during the Japanese military occupation of China, the factory was tasked with making woven army blankets. In 1945, the Ministry of Economic Affairs assumed ownership of the factory and renamed it Shanghai the 18th Cotton Textile Factory.

98

I. LEUNG

to acquire artworks that were sporadically produced from various regions of Shanghai and sell them at semi-public spaces such as hotels, restaurants and parks. The relocation of Shanghart to M50 coincided with an organisational shift of art production from an ad hoc manner to a more systematic approach. The production model in Taopu resembled that of sophisticated factories whose resources, personnel and production schedules were meticulously coordinated for optimal return. This production model was situated behind the studio of Xu Zhen and other of Shanghart’s contracted artists, including Yang Fudong and Yang Zhenzhong. While the artists Shanghart represented were seemingly independent of one another, their resources and creative processes served cooperative ends. Shanghart’s artworks were produced in a rural industrial area, Taopu, while trading took place in urban centres, such as M50, which resulted in an urban–rural divide between the production and consumption of art. Shanghart’s grounds and facilities, whether at M50 Road or Taopu, were contributed by state-owned companies that were initially founded by private merchants. The change in land use in both M50 and Taopu denoted a significant decline in industries producing domestic goods, which was unexpectedly replaced by a fast-growing demand for contemporary art. Lurking behind these changes was another layer of the city’s intervention, which shaped the production of art both directly and indirectly. 2020—A New Landmark in the Making In 2019, the announcement of the ‘Taopu Smart City’ project marked a significant step in the broader initiative to establish an industry belt supporting the growth of China’s digital economy during the fourteenth five-year period, spanning from 2020 to 2025. The project sought to nationalise 4,427.80 acres of land in Taopu and develop commercial facilities, research centres and high-end residential areas there in just a few years. Despite having spent almost 10 years cultivating a substantial cluster of artist studios in the district, Taopu Creative Park was no exception, and it was identified as a part of the redevelopment plan. By December 2019, only 13 renters, including Shanghart, remained after 146 tenants had finished the move. According to an article published by the Putuo District (Taopu 2020), Shanghart initially proposed a compensatory payment of RMB 25 million for the trouble of moving its collection of more than 500 works out

5

COMMERCIAL GALLERY—A REINVENTION OF SELF …

99

of the district. After several rounds of negotiation, Shanghart signed a contract and eventually agreed to move out. In 2022, ultra-modern structures began to appear throughout Taopu, inviting a flood of high-tech companies and new residents. The recently developed West Bund District became the new home for Shanghart’s collection. Xu Zhen’s Studio—An ‘Art Factory’ Carrying Forward the Essence of Old State-Run Factories The previous chapter studied the MadeIn Gallery at West Bund as it appeared during my 2017 trip to Shanghai. This chapter recounts my 2009 visit to Xu Zhen’s studio, hoping to trace the history of Xu’s mode of artistic production that prefigured his galleries and stores. I went to see Xu Zhen on 19 July 2009 at his studio in Shanghart’s complex, which was still located in Taopu Creative Park; many artists represented by Shanghart had recently established themselves in the district. The front door opened with a heavy thud. Alexia Dehaene, Project Director for MadeIn, came to greet me. At the entryway of Xu’s studio, I noticed a fish tank with gravel and water plants, reminiscent of the Feng Shui decorations prevalent in many Chinese offices. To the left of the fish tank, two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves held a wide array of publications, from art books such as Wu Hung’s A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art to business books such as Song Deli’s14 A Practical Guide to International Business. The main room, where I had expected to see an artist’s studio filled with messy desks and a riot of art supplies, looked like a typical office. One side of the room was lined with ergonomic desks and computer screens, while Dehaene’s lone workstation was next to a photocopier and a floor-standing air conditioner. The main room looked clinically tidy, and it was quiet enough to hear a pin drop. At 12:15 p.m., Xu emerged from the partitioned space and welcomed me with a firm double handshake and an unexpectedly friendly smile. He wore a white t-shirt, short pants and flip-flops and looked altogether like someone relaxing in the comfort of his own home. Born in 1977, he seemed almost too young to have achieved a successful artistic career. Soon after the staff members returned to their workstations, Xu showed me the various ‘departments’ of his office. ‘This corner 14 Song Deli is a well-known bilingual translator who currently works as the news editor for SinoVision in New York City.

100

I. LEUNG

is the web publishing branch Art-Ba-Ba’,15 he said, referring to his online magazine, which provided news and gossip about the Chinese art world. ‘This is research and development’, he continued as he pointed to a staff concentrating on several doodle-style American illustrations on a computer screen. After a quick introduction to a few staff members, Xu led the way to his private office upstairs. From the warehouse’s entrance to its interior, nothing I saw resembled the artist studios I had grown accustomed to seeing. I started our conversation with a question that had nagged me for some time: why form a company rather than operate as an independent artist under his own name? ‘It seems to me that using MadeIn is more appropriate than using my own name’, said Xu, his left hand on the edge of his couch. ‘I think we are a small system and the artist himself is also a system; the notion of a company represents that system well’. Just like Takashi Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki Company, MadeIn was a real business entity, more than just a pseudonym. When I asked Xu if his company was modelled after Murakami’s Hiropon Factory, he answered indirectly, ‘This idea of employing many assistants to fabricate artworks had already reached its climax in the West. What I want here is a fundamental change. I really don’t know what MadeIn is leading to…MadeIn Company was founded less than a year ago and I hope we will work in magazine publishing, research and many other directions in the future’. When Xu was enthused about MadeIn, his eyes became wider and he raised his brows. Xu has worn multiple hats in the Chinese art world from the beginning of his career. For many people, MadeIn’s forays beyond the arts industry came as no surprise. Aside from being an artist, Xu was the director of BizArt—M50’s first experimental art space—for many years. Founded by curator Davide Quadrio in 1998, who was joined by Xu in 2000, BizArt had already hosted more than 180 exhibitions. In the nearly complete absence of not-for-profit art institutions, BizArt marked a major step forward in the history of Shanghai’s independent arts scene

15 The magazine is chiefly sponsored by JNBY, a clothing company established in 1994 in Hangzhou. JNBY is one of the most well-known fashion brands in China and operates more than 300 franchise stores across the world. Recent branch openings include those on Greene St in SoHo, New York City, and at Galeries Lafayette in Paris.

5

COMMERCIAL GALLERY—A REINVENTION OF SELF …

101

by providing an alternative to state-owned museums and art spaces built expressly to serve commercial interests. When I asked Xu why BizArt had closed, he explained, ‘After years, there are a lot newer spaces for art. In the past RMB 5000 could have supported a pretty good exhibition for an artist. Today, these artists are represented by commercial galleries and they have far greater negotiating leverage. We no longer have enough money to present them’. In fact, BizArt had presented many high-profile artists, including Wu Shanzhuan, Zhang Peili and Ai Weiwei, each of whom was relatively unknown in the 2000s. While many artist-led collectives in the West eventually transform themselves into private foundations with support from public and corporate sources, BizArt was unable to evolve beyond its legal status as a private company. ‘This is a common problem for art spaces in China. I think that we should progress to new things; otherwise, things become meaningless. I gained some experience at BizArt that I am now applying to MadeIn’. Prior to BizArt’s collapse, rumours abounded that the decision to fold was due to a dispute between Xu and Quadrio. Regardless of how accurate these rumours were, BizArt’s closure led to the migration of employees and businesses to MadeIn, while Quadrio continued to operate under the name BizArt. Xu’s decision to assume the roles of creator, curator, promoter, publisher and critic was rooted in his unease about the state of contemporary art in China. ‘I believe that the art system in China is too monotonic—either it is too commercial, too “high-end” or too international’. For an artist in his early thirties, Xu seemed especially sceptical about artists of past generations. ‘Artists over forty can often only do little to change the world, except thinking about their own enterprises. There are no challenges for this generation of artists; all they need to do is find a gallery to work with them. It’s quite a baffling system. If you produce good work, no one says a word and if you make bad work, no one is credible enough to judge them as such. In a country where everything is relative and there are no standards, art can be easily monopolised’, Xu added with a disdainful wrinkle of his nose. After an hour of spirited discussion, Xu glanced at his watch and asked if I would like to join his team for lunch. I accepted his offer and followed him downstairs. In the main office, instead of seeing the staff sitting stiffly in front of their desks, more than 20 employees were already queuing in front of the kitchen, where their lunch trays were filled with half of a

102

I. LEUNG

preserved egg, one roasted chicken thigh and chunks of boiled cabbage. If Takashi Murakami’s ‘Hiroo Factory’16 and Jeff Koon’s studio17 symbolise the functional factory aesthetics so popular in our age, Xu’s company seemed to have preserved the spirit of the state-run factories that formerly inhabited the same space from the 1950s through the 1970s. Despite having spent the whole morning in MadeIn, I had not seen a single piece of artwork. After gulping down the watery vegetable soup, I left the main office and continued to explore the rest of the factory building. Passing by the kitchen where the housekeeper was industriously scrubbing piles of dirty dishes, I was drawn by a high-pitched squeak leaking from the other side of the wall. In the next room, I saw eight women hemming bunches of colourful woven fabric using old Butterfly sewing machines18 —a scene that evoked images of a typical preautomation garment factory. Workers with their hair fastened by elastic scrunchies carefully picked up the right fabric and sewed according to the detailed instructions given on an illustrated guide printed on a single sheet of A4 paper while being kept cool by a few electric pedestal fans. On the other side of the room, an overhead projector displayed an enlarged outline on a stretch of blue canvas that was pinned to the wall. Six younger workers traced the outline and stitched various appliqué patterns onto their own pieces of canvas. Beyond the partitioned wall, a series of half-finished Tracey Emin-esque pieces sat on the floor and were hanging on the wall. Each of these elements was a part of Spread B-0290, a project Xu had been working on since 2009. Each artwork had its genesis in Xu’s meeting room, where MadeIn staff exchanged ideas for new pieces. The most promising ideas were then researched, followed by cycles of manual and digital sketching and tweaking by the young artists. After printing the resulting artwork file on paper, specifications for each artwork’s components were handed over to the production studio. Labourers were hired as each piece dictated—whenever possible, Xu hired low-cost labour. Much like other 16 Like any contemporary manufacturing factory, Hiroo Factory uses computerised time

recorders to keep track of its employees’ attendance. 17 Jeff Koon’s studio resembles a high-tech laboratory where assistants are dressed in medical scrubs and facemasks. Expensive colour-mixing machines are used to achieve custom hues and tints. 18 A sewing machine brand produced by Shanghai Yah Chong Sewing Machine Manufactory, which was founded in 1919.

5

COMMERCIAL GALLERY—A REINVENTION OF SELF …

103

commodity chains predicated on converting inputs to outputs—raw materials to commodities—finishing the artwork was only the first step towards selling it. Then, it was the responsibility of MadeIn’s marketing and sales teams to communicate the value of each piece before its eventual sale. Additionally, MadeIn actively participated in the curation and interpretation of each piece and its promotional efforts extended to artists’ statements. Whenever a new work was exhibited, the company’s publishing department delivered reviews and newsfeed items to the Art-Ba-Ba website. Xu’s position as an artist playing multiple roles in the art supply chain was rather unusual in China’s art world. Many thought, quite reasonably, that MadeIn had invited a conflict of interest; others saw its approach as a critique of the already corrupted Chinese art industry. No matter how dearly Xu may have wanted to break away from the innate conformity of China’s arts scene, most of his works of art were still presented by and exhibited at Shanghart. Indeed, MadeIn’s offices were originally supplied by Shanghart; the studios of other artists represented by Shanghart, including Yang Zhenzhong, Yang Fudong and Zhang Ding, were located next to Xu’s. Even if, in Xu’s words, Xu and MadeIn represented ‘a small system’ within the art world, that system existed within a broader one. Time went by very quickly. Around the time that Taopu Creative Park was demolished in 2020, MadeIn Gallery relocated from West Bund to One Museum Place. One Museum Place is a 60-storey office tower and shopping mall located in the Jing’an District. The gallery moved once more a year later, this time to Qufu Road. Its new location sat next to OCAT Shanghai, a Shenzhen-based non-profit institution for the arts with a focus on media art and architectural design. The array of institutional models that Shanghart and MadeIn Gallery use are dynamic and diverse and they resemble what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘rhizome’, which is a nonlinear network that connects ‘any point to any other point’ (Messina-Dysert et al. 2016, p. 28). The production, distribution and consumption of art facilitated by Xu’s studio and his gallery, together with Helbling’s business, created a multiplicity of relations upon relations. The establishment and demolition of Taopu also witnessed moments of ‘deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation’, to borrow another phrase from Deleuze and Guattari, in which actors constantly rebuilt their territories in response to changes in the natural world while connecting to other multiplicities of power (FitzGerald et al.

104

I. LEUNG

2018). Who knows if Shanghart and MadeIn Gallery will relocate once more in the future? We do know that the various actors in the Shanghai art world constitute a root system that is constantly expanding and entwining. They are always growing and, it seems, are always on the move.

Part 2: Shanghai Gallery of Art and Vanguard Gallery While Shanghart and MadeIn represent a mutually beneficial intertwining, SGA’s network resembles a vertically integrated corporation. I met with Min Kwak, SGA’s sales and marketing manager, on 15 August 2009 in an effort to learn more about the operations of one of Shanghai’s longeststanding art galleries. Kwak, wearing a white chevron tunic, was pregnant at the time and was glowing with expectant motherhood. Her sophisticated hairstyle, colourful necklaces and bold makeup gave Kwak an air of managerial gravitas with a bit of a maverick streak that suited her position in the art world. Before assuming her role at SGA, Kwak worked at Shanghart for a year—her first job in Shanghai after moving there in 2007. ‘I guess I was bored of Paris for the same reason that many expatriates around here were. I wanted to come to Asia and, yeah, Shanghai was said to be the place to be at the time’, Kwak remarked, raising her eyebrows for emphasis. Unlike first-generation gallerists like Helbling, who arrived there in the early 1990s largely on his own initiative, Kwak moved to China as part of a large wave of expatriates. Back in 2006, China’s art market saw total sales of US$300 million, a 21-fold increase from what it had achieved in 2000 (Barboza 2007). ‘I was more interested in China because everyone started talking about Chinese art in 2007. Literally everyone!’ said Kwak with a laugh. Like most of the foreigners I encountered in the Shanghai art world, Kwak had been attracted by Shanghai’s long history of cosmopolitanism. ‘Geographically, I suppose Shanghai is more interesting. You know, it’s important to be in an attractive city. Of course, an international city makes it easier to live in. This city is a rich city, a very rich city’. While Shanghart is owned and run by a single gallerist, SGA is a wholly owned subsidiary of a Singapore-based holding company, Nuri Holdings.

5

COMMERCIAL GALLERY—A REINVENTION OF SELF …

105

Incorporated in 1993 by business magnate Michelle Liem Mei Fung,19 Nuri is an international conglomerate with more than 80 companies spanning a variety of industry sectors, from tyre production,20 real estate, catering and clothes to machinery and high-tech industries. Despite its significance in the art world, SGA is only a subsidiary of House of Three, a daughter company of Nuri Holdings that was founded in 2019 with a US$40 million initial investment by Liem and Handel Lee.21 ‘I’m not sure how much you know about this company’, continued Kwak. ‘Usually, a commercial gallery adopts a mono-line structure with the curator serving as the owner and is responsible for all major decisions. Here at SGA, we have the owner of the company, to whom executive management reports. The gallery and its employees lie in a stratum below executive management. We are a part of a larger cultural complex called Three on the Bund, which also houses numerous other subsidiaries of Nuri Holdings, so our gallery is more like a hospitality establishment with a focus on culture’. I visited Three on the Bund on Zhongshan East Road a week before I met Kwak. Originally known as the Union Building, Three on the Bund was the first building in Shanghai to feature a steel structure and was formerly home to several British-owned insurance companies.22 The sixstorey building was originally designed by Palmer & Turner Architects and Surveyors in 1916 and was restored by noted American architect Michael Graves in 2001. Located between the Waldorf Astoria Shanghai Hotel and the Shanghai headquarters of Hua Xia Bank (founded by Deng Xiaoping), Three on the Bund anchored the ‘Wall Street of Asia’, a prosperous area catering to affluent tourists and shrewd entrepreneurs alike. The building’s main entrance on Guangdong Road was typically flooded with streams of people brushing past one another and its little stretch 19 Liem holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics and an MBA from the University of Chicago. She serves as the director of many private companies and is currently on the Global Advisory Board (Asia Cabinet) of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. 20 Giti Tire (China) Investment Co., Ltd is one of the biggest tyre manufacturers in

China. It holds 47 sales and service centres and more than 10,000 retail outlets across the country. 21 A notable entrepreneur in China who was known as the ‘Style Setter’ for of his investments in the fashion and lifestyle industries. 22 Including the Union Insurance Society of Canton Ltd, founded in Hong Kong in 1835, and the North China Insurance Company, founded in 1863.

106

I. LEUNG

of the street was Shanghai’s centre of social gravity, where millionaires, oligarchs, whiz-kids and well-to-dos rubbed shoulders. Doormen in pristine, epauletted uniform coats orchestrated the arrivals and departures of chauffeurs at the manor-style doorway. The main door was flanked by shop windows showcasing Giorgio Armani’s first retail location in China. Visitors were greeted with a lavish statement of luxury in the cool, marble-clad lobby, featuring dazzling chandeliers, sculpted pillars and art nouveau roses decorating the reception area. The interior was designed by acclaimed architect Lyndon Neri, selected as one of the world’s 40 leading designers globally by I.D. Magazine. The floor directory was skilfully inscribed on a marble tablet to my right, echoing the building’s glory days. A few steps ahead took me to a dedicated elevator, the interior of which was only lit by LED floor buttons bearing the names of the building’s tenants. The elevator first stopped on the second floor, where a young lady stepped out to the Evian spa. Scents of lemongrass and lavender soon permeated every corner of the elevator, which was an unexpectedly invigorating moment; such delicate aromas were uncommon in Shanghai. The fifth floor was home to the Whampoa Club. The restaurant was launched by Jereme Leung, a Zagat-recommended chef and former executive chef of the Four Seasons Hotel in Singapore. Ranked as the world’s eighteenth most expensive restaurant by Forbes Magazine, Whampoa was a treasure trove. It was not the only upscale restaurant in the building. The second floor of Three on the Bund featured Unico and Colagreco, two Latin restaurants run by Michelin-starred chef Mauro Colagreco. The fourth level is home to Jean-Georges, a part of famed restauranteur Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s global empire. One of the top five French restaurants in the Americas, the original Jean-Georges at 1 Central Park West proudly continues its legacy with its Michelin-starred restaurant. Cupola, on the building’s top floor, might be the most elite private dining venue in the city. This discreet restaurant once hosted celebrities such as Tom Cruise and Halle Berry, where they dined on meals catered by the Three on the Bund’s restaurants. ‘So, a single foreign family has a long-term lease on this building’, Kwak explained, ‘and they also are the owners of all the subsidiary companies operating here. Actually, the only places in this building that are not owned by our parent company are Armani and MCM. Even the Evian spa is under the same management. Let’s say that the people who come

5

COMMERCIAL GALLERY—A REINVENTION OF SELF …

107

for the dining and entertainment experience are in the mood to spend money and have a good time. They may not necessarily be art collectors but they see something nice and they have the means to buy it. And they would buy it because it’s not that much money for them’. Three on the Bund serves as a sort of celebrity playground, hosting PR events and exclusive private parties. Actress Joan Chen graced MCM’s opening soirée, Tod’s creative director Derek Lam attended Amazon’s party and Wallpaper’s editor-in-chief Tony Chambers attended Chivas Regal’s private event. Kwak continued, ‘It’s very easy. Whenever there are celebrities and politicians in town, they first visit Cupola or Jean-Georges before coming here to the gallery. Just last year, Tony Blair’s wife Cherie joined us as a guest at the gallery’. On the surface, SGA asserted itself as an entity distinct from the glitz, glam and fancy restaurants.23 In reality, the building’s seemingly diverse business establishments were strategically arrayed to serve their chief purpose: the maximisation of profits. When all is said and done, SGA’s steady stream of affluent clients was mostly due to the building’s unmatched location. Given that all other historical buildings on the Bund were fully owned and managed by the city, I was curious to learn how Michelle Liem was able to obtain a lease for her building. Kwak’s answer was somewhat cagey, ‘Yeah, you know, Three on the Bund has a very close relationship with the government. We must be friends with the government for a variety of reasons’. This friendship allowed Liem to develop the Union Building and SGA was able to add the government to its list of clients in addition to the nouveau wealthy. ‘We recently had a big, big work sold to the district government and it was placed in a public space near the People’s Square. And we are very happy about that’. ‘We have been receiving more and more corporate customers’, she added, ‘especially those from banks and listed corporations. And that’s really, really good. We’re really happy about that’. More than half of SGA’s clients lived abroad, according to Kwak, even those who owned artworks that were on exhibit in Shanghai. Some of these overseas clients were travellers who had only dropped by Shanghai for a few days, but many of the collectors abroad had never visited the gallery in person or actually seen the works they had purchased. ‘There are many collectors who just contact us via email, particularly if they know

23 All the restaurants are branded separately and are operated as individual businesses.

108

I. LEUNG

exactly what they want, and we don’t need to do anything else. For me, there are occasions when I don’t even know where the person is—they could be in Pudong or Brazil or wherever. Those sophisticated collectors don’t need to come here, they already know us well enough’. Prices for artworks sold by galleries are determined by the time of the year and availability, but also by the means, tastes and motivation of the collector. ‘I met a few institutional collectors but they are small collectors who frequently complain that some galleries don’t consider them important enough to prioritise them over others. We’re not running an auction house where one can just buy whatever they want provided they have enough money. If we’re choosing between an anonymous collector and a famous one, we typically transact with the famous one. It’s unfair, in my opinion. We sell artwork to high-profile collectors not because they know more or who necessarily likes it more or deserves it more…it’s a matter of personal relationship. Of course, there is a hierarchy of priority’. In the end, the longstanding secret to the success of commercial galleries like SGA was maintaining client lists and transactions to themselves. ‘Of course, I completely disapprove of this practice’, Kwak added, ‘But I’m a gallery person’. Vanguard Gallery Established galleries Shanghart and SGA exemplify a sophisticated chain of artistic production and distribution. Both galleries directly benefited from the growth in the economy that followed the early stage of China’s booming art market. My conversations with Helbling and Kwak prompted me to think about how galleries with limited capital survive in the art world. A month after I talked to Kwak, I visited Lise Li’s Vanguard Gallery, which is relatively new and smaller in scale. Sitting in her gallery presenting several works that were produced by artists who were just a few years old when Li witnessed dramatic changes that occurred in China in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Li began to talk about why she chose to work and live in Shenzhen before opening her gallery in Shanghai. ‘It was right after Deng Xiaoping’s tour of the south. The tour had just set the tone for Shanghai’s development. I remember when I came back to Shanghai in 1991, the Nanpu Bridge had just been inaugurated. It was guarded by armed police and ordinary cars were not allowed to cross the bridge without a permit. I recall I once took the Nanpu Bridge to Pudong

5

COMMERCIAL GALLERY—A REINVENTION OF SELF …

109

during a visit. There was literally nothing to see in Pudong. On contrary, Shenzhen, which is next to Hong Kong, was a cutting-edge, open city. Shenzhen was the most dynamic place in China when I was in college’, Li continued. Deng Xiaoping’s tour was one of the most critical periods in China’s modern history, which reinforced the implementation of his ‘Reforms and Opening-up’ programme. After the successful establishment of four special economic zones (Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou and Xiamen), Deng further identified Shanghai as a continuation of his reform and openingup policy. According to Li, the changes in Shanghai were slow after Deng’s tour. ‘Even though Deng Xiaoping said that Pudong would be developed, it was just the beginning and nothing had actually started yet. I remember the Shanghai subway had just opened a little before I graduated in 1995. At that time, I was so curious about what the Shanghai subway was like and I went there for a ride with my classmates. Back in 1991, the Bund was being wrapped up for renovation and I never got a chance to see the old Bund. Shanghai didn’t evolve as quickly at that time as it did in the following years. Between 1991 and 1995, there were actually no galleries in Shanghai; there was only one art museum. I just remembered that I saw a Rodin sculpture exhibition back in 1993 or 1994. It was a large-scale sculpture exhibition—at the Shanghai Exhibition Center—that caused a sensation’. Li claims that in Shanghai in the 1990s, seniority played a decisive role in defining one’s career. Many young people travelled to Shenzhen to seize opportunities and they succeeded regardless of their age and experience. ‘So this matter makes you very excited because you believe you can succeed in Shenzhen’, Li continued. ‘A common attitude in many cities, including Shanghai, was “why should I work hard, I’ll just wait until I get old”. The energy I felt when I was living in Shenzhen was very different from Shanghai at the time’. After working at a bank for six years in Shenzhen, she decided to quit her job and return to Shanghai. After her resignation, Li wanted to pursue her interest in art. ‘When I was in Shenzhen, a classmate of mine visited Shanghai on business and brought me a magazine called The Galleries of Shanghai, which featured a dozen galleries scattered across the city. One day after coming to Shanghai, I noticed Shanghart on the list and I thought it was interesting. Long ago, I heard about Shangart before reading the magazine, and I liked its exhibitions and artists back then.

110

I. LEUNG

Later, I went to the gallery at Fuxing Park. There, I met Lorenz. He enthusiastically gave me a postcard that promoted another exhibition that was taking place in M50 even though it was the first time we had ever spoken. You see, I was looking for a place to rent for my gallery, so I went there to check it out. I still remember; it was the summer of 2003. At the time, only a handful of galleries and non-profit spaces were at M50, including BizArt, EastLink and Shanghart. And then, there were no more than ten artist studios there. ‘I later met an artist who was interested in M50. He thought it would be easier to negotiate the rental fee with the landlord if we both rent a place in M50 together. He asked me if I was interested, I said yes and now here I am’. Li felt that her gallery’s location was not ideal. When Li originally launched her gallery, most of M50’s visitors were artists from Shanghai; there were hardly any tourists visiting the district. Unlike Helbling, who was already quite experienced in running a gallery, Li put a lot of work into learning how to manage Vanguard. ‘Lorenz was very helpful. A year after I opened my gallery, Lorenz asked if I wanted to host my exhibition’s opening reception at the same time as his. As you may know, Shanghart’s opening reception usually attracts a lot of guests. It really helped to promote my exhibitions. We held a major exhibition at Vanguard in 2006, and Lorenz agreed to let his artists participate in my show and he gave me a lot of help. Sometimes he even brought his own guests to visit my gallery’, Li added. The success of a few Chinese artists in foreign art exhibitions, along with Helbling’s early entry into the art market before many competitors, made it much easier for Helbling to profit from the highly marketable first-generation contemporary Chinese artists. While Li did not have sufficient ties with established artists, her gallery focused on emerging ones. She claimed that artists from earlier generations, such as those born in the early 1970s, paid more attention to politics. Many young artists were less restrained from the so-called troubles that the previous generation faced. Li was interested to know about the emerging artists. In most circumstances, artwork produced by emerging artists is seen as long-term investments rather than ones optimised for a quick return. For Li, the works she displays may take up to 10 to 50 years before her patrons see real monetary return. She decided to work with artists on a long-term basis since the type of art she marketed required a long investment cycle.

5

COMMERCIAL GALLERY—A REINVENTION OF SELF …

111

‘The one thing that everyone in China fears the most is waiting. I often hear collectors telling me that they wanted to get paid back within half a year…I think the term “cultural industry” is doomed to fail. Art is a humanistic thing. It takes time to create value for art and it cannot be done in an industrial manner. Our government has been pushing cultural industry and everyone thinks that they need immediate results’, Li stated. ‘After all, it’s such a big country. Unless there is a big natural or manmade disaster, China’s economy has not yet reached its peak and it will definitely continue to rise for a few decades to come. Art and culture follow the economy. You know, the Renaissance was cultivated in similar economic prosperity in Italy’. At 6 p.m., I left M50 after a two-hour chat with Li. I took a last look at the district and thought that perhaps Li was right; the country’s remarkable economic growth has brought tremendous attention to contemporary Chinese art. Is that all that art is about? On the one hand, Li’s personal quests for meaning in life prompted her to quit her job in the finance industry and became a gallerist. She believed in the righteousness of art; she questioned speculative trading and helped emerging artists realise their dreams. Conversely, she embraced the opportunities that came with the continuing growth of China’s economy, believing that the cultural and economic value of art was more closely related to a country’s economic standing. Li’s practice witnessed both experimentation with novel methods in managing a gallery while also coupling them with careerist rationality and finding herself situated at a crossroads between self-persuasion and instrumental careerism. Despite Li’s optimism about her business, in the long run, she inevitably had to spend money and effort to help her relatively unknown artists gain recognition. Before our conversation came to a close, Li remarked, ‘An artist joked with me once. He asked me why I didn’t turn my gallery into a non-profit space, given that my practice is very much similar to what a non-profit organisation would do. I told him that I didn’t want to. I also want to make money. After all, I have to make a living’.

112

I. LEUNG

Conclusion---A ‘Charismatic-Networked Game’ Invented by Multiple Actors The stories surrounding Helbling, Xu, Kwak and Li in this chapter show how actors in the art world were incorporated into various micronetworks, where multiple relationalities were tied together across different locations. In On Calling ANT , Bruno Latour identifies ‘actor-network’ as ‘the summing up of interactions through various kinds of devices, inscriptions, forms and formulae, into a very local, very practical, very tiny locus’ (Jacobs et al. 2012). In the various locales portrayed in this chapter, different actors organised their own micro-connections with others actors while adjusting their action plans to respond to the constantly changing social landscape. Helbling invented a novel method to sell artwork in a hotel hallway, seized the opportunity of M50 and transformed himself from a fresh graduate to one of the most important gallerists in China. He serves as an active mediator, offering Xu studio space, giving Kwak the idea of managing a gallery and helping Li expand her client network. While he seized waves of opportunities that presented themselves in different locations in Shanghai, he also weaved through challenges at distinct times, developed coping mechanisms for the constantly shifting interactions among players and brought change to social structures. Xu leveraged his relationship with Quadrio and expanded his network throughout the local and international art communities. Since then, he has learned to create a new ‘system’ for MadeIn and branded himself as a one of a kind artist and entrepreneur. His company, along with Helbling’s gallery, displayed multilayer networks in which different groups of actors were separated into distinct layers while yet appearing to make the best use of resources for mutually beneficial outcomes. As for Kwak, she took advantage of her gallery’s remarkable location to gain greater recognition among collectors and succeed as a dealer. By recognising the nature of her gallery and reorganising the configuration of actors within her networks, she was able to seize opportunities. Her charisma and knowledge allowed her to manoeuvre among different contexts at various micro-sites inside the Three on the Bund building, transforming her local encounter into a larger network of relationships that included celebrities, city officials, bankers and overseas collectors. Despite having a different perspective on art than Kwak, Li aimed to produce purposive and useful outcomes through her art. The mutually

5

COMMERCIAL GALLERY—A REINVENTION OF SELF …

113

beneficial exchange between her and the emerging artists demonstrates how actors considered the internal inconsistencies of contemporary art and arrived at their own value judgement. Between art for art’s sake and its commodity value, the meaning of art was frequently debated. Apart from the intervention of the city, the actors studied in this chapter raise much broader questions about how new social realities were created by actor networks. Within the ‘charismatic-networked game’ (Berghuis 2019, p. 181), different actors engaged in intense activities of convincing others of their ideas, offering others help and harnessing resources held by other actors. Depending on their place in the network, they exercised their performative power. Together with the new spatial configurations that took place in different locations in Shanghai, such as M50, Taopu and the Bund, numerous agencies networked with one another and strived for co-creation opportunities. The production and reception of the built environment informed changing spatial relations between objects and people, allowing networks to be formed and re-formed within the dynamic art world of Shanghai.

References Barboza, David. 2007. In China’s new revolution, art greets capitalism. The New York Times, January 4. Berghuis, Thomas J. 2019. ‘We care as much as you pay’—Curating Asian art: Essay. In A companion to curation, ed. Brad Buckley and John Conomos, 181–186. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. FitzGerald, Sharron A., Kathryn McGarry, Annia Carline, and Jamie Murray. 2018. Reconceptualising on-street sex work as a complex affective social assemblage. Essay. In Realising justice for sex workers: An agenda for change, 214. Blue Ridge Summit: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Jacobs, Jane M., Stephen Cairns, and Ignaz Strebel. 2012. Materialising vision— Performing a high-rise view. Essay. In Envisioning landscapes, making worlds: Geography and the humanities, ed. Stephen Daniels, 258. London: Routledge. Messina-Dysert, Gina, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Monica A. Coleman. 2016. Blogging as religious feminist activism: Essay. In Feminism and religion in the 21st century: Technology, dialogue, and expanding borders, 28. New York: Routledge. Taopu. 2020. Another piece of land expropriated in Putuo—Where 100% relocation is almost completed, a medical centre will be built in the future! Shanghai Putuo, June 10. http://www.shpt.gov.cn/tpz/tpxw/20210129/ 571073.html. Accessed 15 Oct 2022.

CHAPTER 6

In-Between Spaces—A Global Adventure for Collectors and Curators

This chapter identifies some areas that serve as a crossroads of meanings but are contingent, temporary or not yet well defined. It portrays how key players are culturally footloose because they form connections between the local and the global. This chapter aims to study how various key players intersect in multiple worlds to produce their own experience of globalisation. It begins with my encounter with Uli Sigg in 2017, followed by my interviews with independent curators Biljana Ciric and Zhang Ga. It demonstrates the emergence of a new organisational field in the past, situated at the intersection of the market, city, and institutional orders. It interlinks the other important figures mentioned above and analyses how, during the course of artistic development over the past few decades, the trajectory of the individual and the dynamics of the collective have been constantly negotiated. In the world of art, collectors play a significant role in defining art and shaping the public’s taste. They attend gallery openings and fairs, engage with artists and dealers and navigate between all kinds of spaces. This chapter’s first section traces the trajectory of Sigg, a Swiss businessman, diplomat and art collector who has amassed over 2500 works of Chinese art. The interview with Sigg covers how he liaised the first joint venture between China and a foreign country in the 1970s. Sigg’s

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I. Leung, Tracing Contemporary Chinese Art, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2668-8_6

115

116

I. LEUNG

story continues in the 2000s with an account of him presenting his exhibition in the United States. His interview reveals how the transnational flow of art collections in the art world allows people like him to create an international market and discourses of contemporary Chinese art. The second section of this chapter covers Ciric. Currently based in Melbourne, Ciric used to be an active curator in Shanghai. She displayed her work in notable places, such as the Rockbund Museum, Venice Biennale, Shanghai MoCA and Guangdong Times Museum. Based on my interview with Ciric and abundant sources of exhibition records, this part illustrates the momentous changes the Shanghai contemporary art scene underwent in the last two decades. Ciric witnessed how, in the early 2000s, the Shanghai Biennale became a milestone in the contemporary art scene in Shanghai when many private and public institutions started to incorporate contemporary art as part of their mission. Ciric also served as the director of the curatorial department of the Duolun Museum of Modern Art during this time. This chapter discusses why the mayor of Hongkou District opened the Duolun Museum of Modern Art and recalls how the early alternative art spaces—such as Biz Art opened by Xu Zhen and DDM Warehouse opened by Zheng Weimin—no longer exist. Her stories depict China at a time when many art practitioners were still looking for new modes of aesthetic valuation and organisational forms. The last section of this chapter studies Zhang, a professor at Tsinghua University and Parsons School of Design and a curator of media art. Similar to Sigg and Ciric, Zhang navigates between China and the West, connecting China with the global art map. His notable exhibitions include Synthetic Times, a Beijing Olympics Cultural Project in 2008 and the Shanghai eARTS Festival in 2009, a mega media art festival sponsored by the Shanghai municipality. For Zhang, the ecological institutions, communities and social networks that first appeared in 2009 created a new space between the cultural sector, the city and private corporations. By illuminating Zhang’s views on media art, this chapter presents how technology has been utilised as a tool to promote advancements and transform Shanghai’s production-based economy into a knowledge-based economy. It reveals how his projects also create a global ‘space of flows’ by transforming a city’s local setting into sites capable of the production of a global city. Unlike Sigg, Zhang believes that the concept of ‘Chineseness’ is a false thesis. This chapter also portrays Zhang’s conflicted perspective on ‘Chineseness’.

6

IN-BETWEEN SPACES—A GLOBAL ADVENTURE …

117

Part 1: Uli Sigg It was the summer of 2009 and I was in the lobby of the Swissôtel with Sigg. He looked exactly like his photographs in numerous art magazines and newspapers—an older man with a white beard, bald head and wrinkles gracing his face. Sigg was an extremely wealthy man but, despite this, he was very down to earth in many respects. ‘I’m a researcher in contemporary Chinese art, although most people think I’m a collector. I’m a researcher but I have the funds—at least, at times—to purchase the result of my research. That’s how I see it’, said Sigg with a firm nod, when I asked him to describe himself. In the art world, a collector’s motivations can range from being an art enthusiast to reinforcing social image and financial gain. It was the first time I heard from a collector who identified himself as a researcher despite having met many collectors over the course of my career. Sigg earned his Ph.D. in Law in the 1970s, focused on the emergence of television media at the time. Even though Sigg chose not to pursue a career in academia after completing his doctorate, his academic background gave him an unusual perspective on culture and set him apart from other collectors. Having grown up in Switzerland, Sigg went to China in the late 1970s by pure coincidence. ‘It’s not that I had a deep interest in China nor was it laid in my cradle or anything. It so happened that a Chinese delegation came to the company I worked for and they didn’t know how exactly to deal with a journalist yet, so they said, “you do China”. That’s how I got involved’. Sigg represented Schindler, a Swiss elevator manufacturer, and established the first joint venture between China and Europe in 1979. When asked to describe China in the late 1970s, he recalled, ‘Like another continent. Like a biotope. It had been completely isolated from the outside world and it looked like it!’. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping announced the Open Door Policy, aiming to open the country up to foreign investments. As the country was only gradually transitioning to a market economy in the late 1970s, there was no legal framework or business model that could be readily applied to foreign investment. Sigg recalled how challenging it was to make the deal, ‘It was a very complicated matter because at that time China had no legal system, particularly not in the economic space, and it was a planned economy. I came to China to build a company but there was no framework. I had to negotiate with my Chinese partners: What’s our company? How do you draw up a profit and loss statement? How do you derive

118

I. LEUNG

profit? How do you tax profit? This venture later became the model for China. They needed a model to convince Western investors and I ended up giving them that’, Sigg added. Despite Deng pushing hard to attract foreign business, the Cultural Revolution continued to cast a shadow over every sector of the economy. According to Sigg, Beijing faced tremendous pressure to produce the first draft of the joint venture agreement. It took him about half a year to close the deal. ‘Of course, the Cultural Revolution had brought everything out of this isolation’, Sigg continued. ‘People were still scared and weren’t yet ready to speak up. Uncertain as to whether this is truly moving in a new direction or are we going to fall back once more?’. As one could imagine, China witnessed profound changes in the early years following the implementation of the reform policy. From securing an income source that had once been safeguarded by state-owned enterprises to exploring a renewed personhood, many people were searching for ways to survive. While people in China were engaged in a relentless struggle to make sense of the changes, Sigg too faced numerous obstacles. Sigg’s first visit to China, like that of many other foreigners, was a culture shock experience. He recalled, ‘There were no lights. The city was completely dark. And there was nothing to buy. If you went to the very few shops that did exist, to the restaurant, it wasn’t that the personnel were there for the client; rather, the client was there for the personnel. They would tell you if now was the time to talk about something and what exactly you would get to eat’. Sigg referred to the local ‘Friendship Store’ that was dedicated exclusively to foreigners. Apart from customers with foreign passports or local Chinese visitors with family abroad, goods were purchased with foreign exchange certificates. As I listened to Sigg tell stories of China’s past, while sitting comfortably in a fancy hotel lobby, it was hard to imagine a time 30 years ago when goods were not easy to obtain. Besides being confined to shop and eating at certain places, according to Sigg, he was constantly accompanied by people during his stay in China. He was never alone. While he was given only very narrow access to China’s reality, he thought that art would probably provide him with an alternative pathway to gain more access to people’s thoughts in such a radically changing society. Around this time, Sigg met Joan Lebold Cohen, an art historian and photographer who visited the country regularly and witnessed the post-Cultural Revolution China through and through. ‘She may have been the very first Westerner to look at the art

6

IN-BETWEEN SPACES—A GLOBAL ADVENTURE …

119

being produced in China and I knew her quite well’, Sigg said. ‘I knew her husband quite well professionally. So, this was really one of my first encounters with the material. Due to my position at the time, I couldn’t meet artists directly because I would have exposed them to too much danger. I saw a lot of material, including photographs. I also talked to many people other than the artists, so I was pretty well informed’, Sigg remarked. In the 1990s, China’s economy continued to expand rapidly. Sigg also became deeply involved in the field of contemporary Chinese art at that time. According to him, he thought it was strange that nobody was paying attention to what contemporary artists were doing. Once he realised that neither individuals nor institutions inside or outside of China were collecting the experimental artistic movement, he decided he would close this gap by collecting these works, mirroring what Chinese artists were doing at the time. Before the heated Chinese art market saw significant growth in the 2000s, the market value of contemporary Chinese art was extremely low. Sigg explained, ‘If you had one million dollars a year, you could have bought the whole art production of contemporary China, far into the 1990s almost’. Sigg’s decision to collect massive artworks produced during that period was proven to be right. In 2012, Sigg partially donated 1463 works to the M + Museum in Hong Kong (Nittve 2013). The total value of the works was estimated at US$163 million. Not only is the collection representative of a unique epoch in Chinese history, but these pieces also increase in value with time. Later on, Sigg was able to personally meet many artists in later years. He added, ‘I have met far more than a thousand artists. Many Chinese artists struggled, in the beginning, to express and analyse what they were doing. In many cases, I believe, I helped them think more deeply about what they were doing, and reflect on art and their position in all this. I think that this is also a contribution that might not have occurred otherwise’. Sigg thought that one of his biggest contributions was that he helped many artists articulate their thoughts in their artistic production. In the documentary directed by Swiss filmmaker Michael Schindhelm, Ai Wei Wei calls Sigg a maker instead of a collector. Perhaps the reason why Sigg remains one of the most respected figures in the field of contemporary Chinese art is that he is not only a person who engaged in the business of buying works, but he also actively played a role in shaping and co-creating the artistic movement.

120

I. LEUNG

One notable example of Sigg’s efforts to develop a story of contemporary art produced at that time was Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art, an art exhibition initiated by him back in 2008. The exhibition, which was held at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, showcased a significant number of his collection, including over 100 works produced by 96 artists. ‘It was time for a kind of overview of Chinese art creation because in Europe, even more so in the US, people had little to no knowledge of the contemporary Chinese art scene. So I felt that an overview of good quality artwork was necessary for people to understand the breadth and width of Chinese art creation’. ‘And, of course, the choice was made by a Western curator—the main choice. Although Ai Wei Wei and I were both involved, the curator with his own public should decide, you know, how it is presented. It was just our responsibility to pay for the exhibition’s production and maybe prevent the worst mistakes’, said Sigg. Mahjong was a tremendous success. It opened many doors for subsequent exhibitions themed around contemporary Chinese art in the West, especially at a time when China was in the spotlight due to rapid rises in international trade and capital flows. Unlike in recent years, when contemporary Chinese art has been frequently displayed at art institutions in China, throughout the 1990s, many artworks could only be shown in the West. For Sigg, the Western exhibitions created an impact on contemporary art finding a place in official China. In fact, the establishment of different museums, commercial galleries and art districts—as discussed in the previous chapters—was shaped by the growing interest in contemporary Chinese art in the global contemporary art scene, which was mediated by different key players in the field. Sigg was definitely one of them. He added, ‘The flourishing cultural industry is, of course, the city’s main interest and because artists are a small part of this cultural industry, they are quite happy. Many people are aware that there is a lack of soft power abroad and are thinking of means to change this situation. Even if they may not agree with how contemporary art portrays China to the outside world, they think that it seems to be a way to develop soft power because the outside world looks at it and wants to know about it. It is a dilemma for them. This situation, as you know, is not very conducive to good contemporary art’. One way or another, the capital flowing into the field of contemporary Chinese art

6

IN-BETWEEN SPACES—A GLOBAL ADVENTURE …

121

has significantly influenced cultural policy, leading the country to strategically catch up with the development of the arts under the logic of the creative industries. When I asked Sigg about his opinion of the tremendous development of art spaces and districts in China, he said, ‘It’s the Chinese way of doing things, and you should not expect that if anything starts to happen it will happen in a non-Chinese way. And it may be better for something to happen this way rather than not at all. Even if done for the wrong reasons, the result wasn’t so bad. I mean, some of it was desirable and eventually, it will be better refined—I hope. So, basically, it’s a good initiative. Could it, however, be done better? Yes, I think so, but at least…you know it happened’, Sigg added. Whether or not Sigg agreed with China’s real-estate development fever, he was fully aware that he was part of the game. ‘And after that, I think I have been in the market for years. Many houses in China have been built and many fancy cars bought—or partially bought—with my funds. But in the end, I could help young artists a little, by bringing these other works forward for some and lifestyle for others’, laughed Sigg. As a witness to China’s rise and some of the most culturally dynamic periods of the country, I was eager to know if Sigg was optimistic about the future of art in China before I ended my conversation with him. ‘The future is bright!’ Sigg exclaimed. ‘Well, it’s in the hands of the Chinese artists. Will they have strong concepts and good ideas and will they work hard? Sometimes, I think this is the real question, “Will they work hard?”’. ‘I think Western artists generally have to work hard because there may only be a limited window of opportunity’, Sigg continued. ‘Art production has made it much simpler to live a material existence. Even getting rich has become easier. So, it’s possible that some artists grew lazier and felt they didn’t have to search so hard for new answers, new concepts’. Ever since the contemporary Chinese art market boomed, many affluent artists have been supported financially by money from auction houses, galleries and city-initiated projects. Having witnessed the drastic transformation for various artists in the last few decades, Sigg further commented, ‘So, it’s in the hands of the Chinese artists, but many of them may have to work hard. But, if that is the case, why shouldn’t China be one of the greatest art scenes in the world? All the preconditions are here. The mass is here and, you know, 1.3 billion people must be a significant number of creative minds, even against the system, as we saw in the past’.

122

I. LEUNG

As I walked out of the Swissôtel to hail a cab, I thought about Sigg’s comments concerning the future of contemporary Chinese art. China went from a time when contemporary art was a taboo to the present, where museums and galleries are operated like franchised corporations. Do artists now enjoy more freedom in artistic creation, or are they living in a speculative bubble enveloped by the market? On this puzzling note, I closed my delightful day spent talking to Sigg and enjoying an Italian coffee with my mouthfeel combined with a complex aroma.

Part 2: Biljana Ciric Sigg was one of the first foreigners who witnessed the emergence of contemporary Chinese art. A month after I met Sigg, I had the chance to speak with Biljana Ciric, a Serbian who first came to China in 2000, just as contemporary art was starting to intermittently make an appearance in what Sigg called official China. This section covers my interview with Ciric and aims to study another foreigner’s view on how contemporary art was displaced and deployed locally, particularly given that the cultural discourse and market were previously established outside China. Ciric studied female imagery in paintings produced during the Han Dynasty at the East China Normal University. In 2004, right after she received her master’s degree there, she had the opportunity to intern at the Duolun Museum of Modern Art (hereafter Duolun), China’s first public art museum focusing on modern and contemporary art. During the early 2000s, the city frequently provided temporary venues in support of contemporary Chinese art, most notably for the Third Shanghai Biennial, which was held at the Shanghai Museum of Art in late 2000. Though state-owned museums solely dedicated to presenting contemporary art were rare. Initiated by the Shanghai Hongkou District Cultural Bureau, the museum was considered one of the first contemporary art centres in Shanghai. Located at a former vegetable market within an incomplete structure near the junction on the east side of Duolun Road, the museum also witnessed one of Shanghai’s earliest models of a cultural district. While Duolun Road was the birthplace of the Chinese Left-wing Cultural Alliance in the 1930s, the museum was part of the same district where a historical landmark was transformed into a new cultural space. ‘At first, I didn’t know anyone from the museum’, said Ciric. ‘Then I met Shen Qibin, the director. He interviewed me and said, “Ok, you can do some kind of stuff at the academic department”. A year later, I had a

6

IN-BETWEEN SPACES—A GLOBAL ADVENTURE …

123

very small team of people working with me in the curatorial department, organising exhibitions and educational initiatives. I also started a residency programme at that time. A lot of international artists visited the museum. It was actually working quite well when we were there’, Ciric remarked, recalling how she got started with Duolun. In 2003, Shen served as the first executive director of Duolun. Apart from running the city’s first state-owned contemporary art museum, Shen gained notoriety for directing the Shanghai Himalayas Art Museum (formerly the Zendai Museum of Modern Art) after working at Duolun, an ambitious private museum established by a real-estate company that attracted a lot of attention from the art world in the late 2000s. According to Ciric, Shen left Duolun after working there for two years. Ciric subsequently left the museum in 2007 and went on to become an independent curator. Shen once, in an interview, expressed regret over the fact that many outstanding young people he worked with who embraced innovative ideas did not get to stay at the museum due to the museum’s internal system. I was curious to learn from Ciric about what happened to the museum. ‘At that time, Duolun was really strangely structured. We had people among us with different backgrounds. Then there were people like me who ran the programme itself. There were two different parallel structures operating at the same time. For instance, some people were actually from the film industry because Hongkou had a lot of cinemas. There were a lot of folks in their fifties or sixties, waiting for their retirement, you know? On the other hand, our team was very young. It was a strange dynamic. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. The two streams of people came from completely different worlds’, said Ciric. Despite the museum being governed under an atypical administrative structure, Ciric believed that creating a state-run contemporary art museum was far ahead of the times. She added, ‘You know, the mayor of this district, he’s a really great man. He had the awareness needed to build this unique platform. Being my first job, the whole experience was really important to me. It was a real open platform where we were free to do whatever we wanted and to experiment with ideas. I was only a fresh graduate and quite young. I am glad that I had a chance to experience that. Most people would not have such a chance when they first started working in a museum’. Unlike the recently built contemporary art museums like the Rockbund Museum, which was discussed in Chapter 2, the professional

124

I. LEUNG

standards for a museum were not yet formally defined for Duolun. On the one hand, Ciric got a chance to present projects in the public domain while critically engaging in experiments. Conversely, Ciric’s concept was unlikely to be financially viable given the museum’s poor condition as a result of inadequate financing and unprofessional management. During the years when Ciric was working at Duolun, she presented more than 50 projects. Despite the museum being city-owned, Ciric had to find sponsorship to cover the costs of her projects. She claimed that the museum lacked a sufficient budget for the majority of the exhibitions, with the exception of larger initiatives like the Duolun Youth Art Exhibition, an annual exhibition that featured an open call for artwork submissions nationally. ‘Even today, if you asked me about where I got the money for my projects, I would say, “I don’t really know”. Back then, I simply believed that if I worked hard enough, somehow things would happen’. ‘For instance, I had zero budget. You know, I didn’t have electricity. Of course, you really need to have a strong belief. If you don’t, the thing really will not happen. Looking back, I can say that we had a great team that I genuinely appreciate them. We never thought about things like, “Oh, we need a salary raise” or something like that. We just wanted to make things happen’, Ciric stated with a smile, a bit of pride on her face. Given the lavish appearance and iconic design of the current stateowned museum, it is difficult to believe Duolun ever presented numerous exhibitions without a budget. According to Ciric, contemporary art remained underground before the early 2000s. She believed that the Shanghai Biennale marked a milestone in changing how private companies and the city perceived contemporary Chinese art. Since then, contemporary art begun to be incorporated. Unlike in recent years, when the nouveau riche class and the public viewed avant-garde art as a soft power tool, Duolun was established at a time when city-run institutions were just slowly beginning to adopt contemporary art. This might explain why funding was limited for Ciric. Despite Ciric’s efforts in curating exhibitions that were largely appreciated by the Shanghai art world, she decided to leave the museum in 2007. ‘I think that revealing our involvement in Duolun today was kind of very important. The director was asked to resign and then we all left because the museum’s entire infrastructure and system had changed. I mean everything changed, really. I have to say, during the last three to four months working there was a nightmare for me’. When I asked

6

IN-BETWEEN SPACES—A GLOBAL ADVENTURE …

125

her what happened, Ciric elaborated, ‘Oh, everything. You wouldn’t get money for shows even though the money did enter the museum’s account. At times, a part of the production cost for the exhibition I curated was taken from my salary’. Although Ciric and her colleagues did not succeed in the end, the projects they curated later set a new benchmark for exhibition-making. Against all the odds, Duolun’s opening in the early 2000s, together with the emergence of private museums and non-profit spaces in Shanghai, was one of the best times for Ciric’s experimental art. ‘At the time, BizArt was super active in doing great projects. I think Xu Zhen and Yang Zhenzhong curated multiple exhibitions every year. And then, in 2005, the Zendai museum opened, which was also affiliated with Duolun because the Zendai corporation had actually signed an agreement with Duolun to fund a residence programme. And then the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai opened half a year later—so a lot of things were happening. Many artists were paying attention to Duolun—you know, expecting things to be done. I think even though our time with Duolun was short, there is no institution today that really has the same effect’. After leaving Duolun, Ciric began her journey as an independent curator. She recalled her first project, an intervention project that involved nine artists performing on the streets. The project was an experiment for her and the artists to temporarily use public space in an artistic manner. Ciric also worked with Zhang Weimin for a collateral event at the Venice Biennial in 2007. She remembered curating these interesting projects after leaving Duolun and she felt that the Shanghai art scene had undergone a radical change starting in the 2000s. She added, ‘I think we need to reinvent the way we react to the current scene. I think that what we need right now is very different from 10 years ago. Alternative spaces like the DDM and BizArt are gone. I don’t think we can continue to create experimental art in the same manner that we did ten years ago. I need to be very sure that a particular institution is doing its work seriously before I become involved with them again. Otherwise, it’s a waste of energy and time. After all, China has a lot of space. There is no lack of space, there is actually a lack of content. We need more professional galleries. I think Shanghart is still the only one, unfortunately. You need much more than that…when it comes to the Rockbund Museum, I don’t know what they’re going to do. It seems to me that it features many famous artists but I don’t know how it can be integrated into the local art scene’.

126

I. LEUNG

As a foreigner who spent more than 10 years in Shanghai, Ciric believed that the city played a unique role in China, always occupying a middle ground between the core and the periphery of the country’s art world. Before we ended our conversation, Ciric remarked, ‘You know, Shanghai always belonged to the mainland but there wasn’t truly at the core. And I think that if the city were more progressive, Shanghai would have long ago become the centre. Shanghai lacks a lot of initiatives, so everything has turned into the kind of individual works and forces that we see in BizArt and DDM. Shanghai’s first biennial went really well. It also had the Shanghai Art Museum, which was among the first to exhibit contemporary art by Ding Yi and other prominent artists. But as you well know, something is missing in terms of recognition. Beijing, for instance, recently established something called the Institute of Contemporary Art. I find it shocking that none of the 20 Chinese artists that were chosen were from Shanghai. It is really upsetting. Even though artists would say, “Oh, we don’t care”, I think this incident says something, you know?’. Ciric’s experience at Duolun, where city funding and professional practice were lacking, suggests that stronger official backing for contemporary art would make Shanghai the centre of China’s art world. Though the emergence of different alternative art spaces and practices could only take place alongside Shanghai’s art world’s quality of unofficialness and spontaneity in contrast to the authorised forms of artistic productions in Beijing—there exists an inherent paradox between the city’s interventions to progress and the value of autonomous experimentation in art.

Part 3: Zhang Ga In 2007, the same year when Ciric left Duolun and started curating other alternative art programmes, Shanghai presented the eARTS Festival. The festival was one of the most talked about events in the art world. Known as the first-ever large-scale media art festival held in China, the festival was also a one of a kind occasion for international collaboration; the Pompidou Center, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ars Electronica and many other international institutions participated. Behind the spectacle was Zhang Ga, a media art curator and one of the key individuals who shaped the project. I met Zhang a few times throughout my career, including at a symposium I curated in Hong Kong. In 2009, I had the opportunity to speak with Zhang once more about his projects. While Sigg and Ciric revealed

6

IN-BETWEEN SPACES—A GLOBAL ADVENTURE …

127

the lives of Westerners in China, this section explores how a diasporic Chinese—who has taken up multiple positions through transnational exchanges—interprets the memory of China’s past and contemporary Chinese art. The Cultural Revolution officially came to an end when Mao Zedong died in 1976. Many schools were shut down during the Revolution, leaving an entire generation of young people unable to obtain a formal education. While the economy was the focus of many efforts, schools also began to reopen between 1977 and 1978. Three years after Mao’s death, the Central Academy of Fine Arts high school started to enrol students. Zhang spent the late 1970s and early 1980s there while he was a student. As one could imagine, many high schools at that time were organised in a way as to align with the country’s status quo. Zhang recalled, ‘China was not really what it is today. Almost every single move was a form of political gesture. You got into trouble for simply trying to do something different than what was allowed in an academic or art education context’. According to Zhang, the late 1970s and early 1980s were a moment of excitement. It was a moment of loss but it was also a moment when everyone was passionately seeking out new knowledge. After the Cultural Revolution, Zhang was very intrigued by the beginning of the country’s transformation. He recalled visiting the Stars Art Exhibition in 1979, where he witnessed artists who had adopted the outlawed Western aesthetic to challenge the artistic conventions at the time. In the early 1980s, Zhang also witnessed the country opening up to Western media when he began to have access to different viewpoints. He said, ‘I think it was around the time that magazines like the Artforum and Art in America started to appear in China. They usually talked about rudimentary things like Kandinsky but anything beyond Expressionism wasn’t really available. Also, there was no translation for these magazines. So knowing English was a huge advantage to be able to access information’. Apart from reading art magazines, Zhang participated in reading groups started by his schoolmates. ‘It’s very interesting that 15-year-old school kids decided to read Kant and Hegel. We did not quite understand what these philosophers were saying. Even though we were really enthusiastic, we always tried to know more. It was a very interesting time’, Zhang remarked. Unlike the West, where societies shared trajectories of similar stages of historical development, everything came all at once in China after the Cultural Revolution. ‘So, there was no difference between hip-hop and

128

I. LEUNG

the Beatles; they both arrived at once. Today, we can nearly always get anything we want. Back then it was not that easy and people really had to search hard. There was a sense of solidarity with people who shared the same ideas and we got together in a much more responsive way than it is today. Even though there weren’t many material things available, pursuing intellectual emancipation was the biggest treasure of my youth. Of course, people also go crazy; they went for drinks, got drunk and all that kind of stuff’, Zhang added with a smile. After graduating from high school, Zhang received a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service and studied at the Academy of Arts in Berlin for four years. ‘I had a girlfriend who was German, so that’s why I wanted the trip! I was in Germany for four years. I saw the [Berlin] Wall come down, which was an important moment in German history. You know, Rebecca Horn was a teacher at my school. There were also a bunch of very big German abstract expressionists who were teaching there’, continued Zhang. Along with drawing inspiration from various visual practices used in the art context, Zhang developed an interest in computers during his stay in Berlin. He recalled buying his first Apple Macintosh for US$3000 in 1991. Since then, he has been fascinated by the possibility of incorporating technology into the process of creating art. A year later, Zhang had to sell his computer to move to New York City. ‘So, I went to New York and later had a girlfriend who was a PhD candidate. Because of her, I got access to the internet during the preweb period. I was excited by the Mozaic; invented in 1993, it was the first graphic browser to be released at the time. I had the opportunity to do links-based web searching and visit chat rooms and all kinds of stuff at her university. That’s how I got even more excited about computers. There was no internet in Berlin, and I wasn’t aware of it back then. So I definitely knew that I was going to do something with the internet after I went to the [United] States. I was not a computer-savvy person but I was really interested in the formal possibilities enabled by computers’. In the mid-1990s, Zhang was very involved with the New York net art movement. Back then, Chelsea was still a derelict industrial zone with plenty of abandoned buildings. Due to the cheap rent, it was the home of numerous artists searching for new ways to make art. During that time, Zhang always found himself at various gatherings in Chelsea, including the Thin Net, a collective founded by a German artist in the formative years of the net art movement. For Zhang, the emergence of

6

IN-BETWEEN SPACES—A GLOBAL ADVENTURE …

129

net art, a democratic art form that provided an alternative exhibition format to museums’ white-cube space, changed the way artists produce art. It started as a fringe art practice, but many museums later began to incorporate net art into their programmes. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 010101 and Whitney Museum’s Data Dynamics were two notable exhibitions that took place after the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s. During that time, Zhang also began to get involved in teaching the emerging art form. He recalled that there were no teaching materials or curricula for media art readily on hand. He had to theorise his own practice and took stock of the latest trends in both art and technology. While Zhang was enthusiastically talking about net art, I was curious to know when he last visited China and how his media art project in Beijing and Shanghai got started. In 1991, Zhang went back to China for the first time after spending several years away. Even though the economic reform policy had been implemented for over a decade, there seemed to be a huge gap between what he had expected and reality. Back in the early 1990s, foreigners and Chinese people were strongly discouraged from interacting on a daily basis. Zhang and his German girlfriend were not permitted to stay in the same hotel room during his two-month visit. Even though the 1990s saw the implementation of a policy supporting overseas education and encouraging return to China, Zhang was being treated differently all the time. On many occasions, he had a hard time converting US dollars into the local currency, Renminbi, because of his foreign passport. According to him, the experience made him feel insulted as if his dignity as a Chinese citizen was being taken away from him. He added, ‘Yeah, you were constantly humiliated upon entering what was meant to be your own country. So I said, “Okay, I’m not coming back”’. During Zhang’s 1991 visit to China, he had the opportunity to reconnect with a few friends he had originally met in high school. After almost 12 years of no contact with the country, these friends got in touch with Zhang in 2003. During the 2000s, China had undergone a dramatic transformation, and Zhang’s friends persuaded him that it was worthwhile to pay a visit to the country again. He continued, ‘What happened was actually very dramatic. First, Beijing had completely changed. It was literally shocking. Then I visited some old friends from the contemporary art scene. You know, all these people are now really famous! Liu Ye, for instance, used to study with me in Berlin and was only living in a regular

130

I. LEUNG

apartment back then. Now, he’s like big, you know. Only a few years’ time, very different situation’. During Zhang’s three weeks stay in China, one of his friends introduced him to a senior professor who eventually helped him meet the vice dean of Tsinghua University. They came up with the idea of conducting research in China and potentially putting on an exhibition. After his trip in 2003, he liaised with different institutions involved in the media art scene. A year later, he curated the first Beijing International New Media Art Exhibition and Symposium. Many leading institutions participated in the project, including Ars Electronica, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. ‘Eventually’, Zhang continued, ‘around 50 universities from all over China showed up. Every school in China was starting a new media department but it was almost like they didn’t know what it meant. So, I think it was a good opportunity for them to know more about what was happening’. The programme lasted three years. According to Zhang, after the first two years of successful events, the presenter was pleased with the outcome. Despite that, Zhang said he had a hard time dealing with the way how projects were managed in China. ‘After the show, I think, I realised there was no money put into this. Of course, financially they covered everything eventually, but the process was just really unclear. Then I finally felt that it wasn’t the right way to work’, Zhang added. For him, a good idea has to be executed by professional individuals. He felt that there was a substantial lack of capable professionals to push the project forward. ‘Well, I think if you can put it this way, a lot of projects in China are very spontaneous’, Zhang continued. ‘They take place as an ad hoc response to the immediate needs at particular moments. Nobody makes a budget in China and nobody follows the budget I give them. Interestingly, in the end, even if there is no budget, everything gets covered. I don’t entirely understand how the art scene works here and I don’t want to. I’ll be probably scared once I understand the nuances of Chinese human relationships, you know? I also wanted to maintain my distance because I need some perspective. It’s probably not wise to be so entangled in these operations here’. Although the project did not continue, in 2006, Zhang was already in a discussion with Fan Di’an, the director of the National Art Museum of China, about putting on a massive media art exhibition during the

6

IN-BETWEEN SPACES—A GLOBAL ADVENTURE …

131

Beijing Olympics in 2008. Titled Synthetic Times—Media Art China 2008, the exhibition featured 44 new media pieces created by artists from over 30 countries. As the Olympics were a key moment for China to draw the world’s attention, major museums seized the opportunity for the country to demonstrate its modernity through various cultural programmes. Between 2006 and 2010, numerous exhibitions meant to produce a spectacle of art meets technology took place in China’s major cities. Among these exhibitions, Zhang also curated the eARTS Festival in Shanghai, which Time called ‘the biggest digital-arts festival in the world’ (Patterson 2007). ‘They’ve already held two festivals’, Zhang continued. ‘One was in 2006—you were there. There was another one in 2008 and this year had one too. So, I think they started to make a framework that advocates the synergy of technology, science and art. You know, one of the reasons for presenting these exhibitions was to entertain those interested in supporting the media industry. It is a unique model. I don’t think there’s anything like that in other countries’. According to Zhang, the term ‘new media’ was developed in the West to identify artworks created using electronic media technology, following a trajectory that derived from the convention of the visual arts. The potential for developing the creative industry sparked the country’s tremendous interest in media art. Zhang thought the term ‘new media art’ became a catchphrase in China, particularly during the time when the country was eager to develop a knowledge-based economy. ‘The creative industry is the umbrella that contains anything that can absorb money, anything that can spew out revenue. I mean, everyone interprets new media differently. The country is pumping so much money out of the animation and gaming industries. They are the driving forces of the cultural industry. I suppose the question is, what do you call it? Cosmetic. The industry needs something that can play a cultural role in monetising products and art is always a very good scapegoat or agent for that role’, Zhang stated. Even though the three consecutive years of the eARTS Festival were a complete success, funding was stopped after the 2019 edition. ‘Yes’, Zhang continued, ‘in China, policies always change quickly, so you need to seize the moment of opportunity. Otherwise, you will be left behind’. Zhang believed that many people attempted to take advantage of the economic boom by creating mega art projects that received both public and private support for their careers. In the last two decades, many people have made large fortunes as China’s rise truly offered the art world unprecedented opportunities. As much as Zhang considered media art

132

I. LEUNG

to be fundamentally different from what many people in China saw in it, he undoubtedly benefited from China’s fast-expanding creative industries. Being a professor, as well as wearing multiple hats in the art world between China, Europe and the United States, the trajectory of Zhang encouraged me to learn what he thought about Chineseness, particularly in the context of him being a diasporic Chinese. ‘In terms of making art, I really don’t see any point to artificially dividing one’s identity’, Zhang responded. ‘I travel a lot and I practice in different places, so it’s not important to me at all. To be honest, I have a big problem with this Chinese art thing. I think it is a misconstrued reality. One of the major players in this hype is the Western media. A group of Western curators, indoctrinated by a so-called “progressive” curatorial practice agenda, created this canon. It has become a stereotypical mode of production. What do you call it? Rhetoric that is both intellectual and popular but lacks much of the real meanings. Of course, it is unfortunate that many Chinese artists still have blind faith in Western curators. They think these curators are crucial to their professional development’. There have been many debates in recent years over how contemporary Chinese art has come to be narrated and interpreted through Western theoretical discourses. Zhang believes it is pointless to distinguish between theories or discourses that originate from the West or China. ‘Financially, China has become one of the most powerful nations in the world, you know? A lot of artists try to create their own cultural presence in China to show that they are not being dominated by Western discussion. This has practically become their mandate’. ‘I don’t even think it’s necessary’, Zhang continued. ‘Like many other things, the discourse that we share was probably generated in the West, but it is no longer exclusively Western. It’s a heritage for humanity. I think that if you look at it this way, you don’t need to have that kind of an agitated sentiment—about China’s lack of, what do you call it, power? The power of speaking’. For Zhang, the notion of Chineseness is a false thesis. As a diasporic Chinese, he believed that Chinese had multiple meanings. ‘Beijing-ness or Cantonese-ness? What is Chineseness? I think the term emerges as a form of nationalistic resurgence. I mean, people have the right to critique society from the perspective of a Chinese person. But if you’re a Westerner, you can’t do that. You will not be tolerated, you know? I think a lot of people have double standards. This is a very outdated way of thinking’.

6

IN-BETWEEN SPACES—A GLOBAL ADVENTURE …

133

Conclusion The stories of Sigg, Ciric and Zhang in this chapter demonstrate how each individual’s experiences are grounded in a decades-long process of globalisation. These tales include their participation in extensive exhibition-making, art trades and cultural exchanges between China and the world. Their experiences are also entangled with economic reform and, subsequently, a wide range of initiatives concerning urbanisation and the cultural industries. As a result, these stories reflect the complexity of flows between people, works of art and discourses rooted in different places both within and outside China, where players performed crucial roles that fostered the formation of contemporary Chinese art. Both Sigg and Zhang had a firsthand view of China’s early years of economic reform. Despite coming from different origins, they witnessed a time when the state’s dominance over the economy, knowledge and many other aspects of life had begun to open. While Sigg strived to create a new business model while silently observing the disparate experimental art practices in China, Zhang was exposed to diverse forms of knowledge when absolute cultural protectionism began to subside. China’s relative autonomy at the time created room for marginal and unofficial voices, including reading groups, the reopening of high school and the Stars Art Exhibition, which, in turn, widened artistic discourses from governing bodies to the broader scope of students and artists. Even though works of contemporary art remained underground, individuals were nevertheless able to acquire, produce and circulate new ideas. Thus, non-state dominant discourses on art were expanded, permitting new art objects, human subjects and discourses to take hold in the emerging field of contemporary Chinese art. Throughout these players’ journey, they gained power and status, which, later in their careers, translated into monetary, social and cultural benefits. In the 1990s, Sigg actively collected works of art and engaged with artists, while Zhang continued to learn about art in the West. The massive collection Sigg amassed was later presented as a major exhibition in the late 1990s, which marked the beginning of contemporary Chinese art in a transnational setting. As a result, Chinese works of art were dispersed and translated into a new discourse in the West. At the same time, China’s creative industries agenda later incorporated and changed the initial marginal and risk-taking experimental media art scene,

134

I. LEUNG

including Thin Net in Chelsea, among others. Knowledge and practice did not simply flow from the West to the East; rather, there was an interactive exchange of artworks and discourse that was embedded in a productive framework. Activities and discourses were spread across multiple spatial scales within a global process that was rooted in various locals. Ciric’s stories further exemplified how massive policies concerning urban development, museum and creative industries in a local setting created new sets of social activity. The initial success of contemporary Chinese art in the West inspired policymakers in China to develop plans that may work for local settings. Despite the policies being somewhat sidetracked, compromised or distorted, the diverse new locations for contemporary art offered players like Ciric and Zhang the opportunity to put their knowledge to use. Concurrently, art was employed as a means to stimulate the economy and enhance the country’s cultural prominence. Alternative spaces, such as DDM and BizArt, a state-owned contemporary art museum and later private art museums all came into being under such circumstances. The aforementioned stories made it clear that while the state’s intervention in contemporary art offered tremendous opportunity for different players, it also led to ongoing conflict because the game’s rules were ambiguous. Ciric’s experience at Duolun was embedded within a broader bureaucratic system, and she constantly negotiated between her artistic ideals and reality. Zhang manoeuvred between being an insider and an outsider, tactically creating a unique position for himself despite dealing with contradictory rules of artistic professionalism and cultural identity. On the one hand, the unprofessional settings that Ciric and Zhang dealt with became a hurdle for them to realise their dreams. Conversely, the visibly undefined rules of the game allowed them to work with the mainstream while maintaining a certain autonomy to flesh out alternative practices and virtuous pursuits. Ciric’s views concerning Shanghai versus Beijing were particularly vivid in exemplifying the advantages of Shanghai being a non-capital city where unofficial networks grew towards a variety of spaces and practices. Before the systematic massive developments like West Bund covered in previous chapters, the relatively peripheral position of Shanghai’s art world created exceptional opportunities for players to experiment. Despite the players’ complaints about the unprofessional practices in various institutions and their scepticism regarding the massive art developments since the late 2000s, they also

6

IN-BETWEEN SPACES—A GLOBAL ADVENTURE …

135

enjoyed public support and were provided with benefits by a scene that was yet to be professionalised. Against the macro backdrop of globalisation, individual players developed a particular pattern of identity construction. These players’ memories and subjective experiences within and beyond China in past decades have continued to influence their trajectories, as well as the notion of contemporary Chinese art. The notion of Chineseness is not a static model for the world of contemporary Chinese art but a complex term at play within and outside China. Sigg acknowledged the fact that stories of Chinese art were told in various places and various ways. He was fully aware of how his collection may be deployed and interpreted in different manners within the complex local and global meanings of Chineseness in different events. For Zhang, his identity as a Chinese had been contested at various points in time. As a diasporic Chinese who was constantly moving between China and the West, he developed strong ties where benefits were obtained from his close-knit relationships with Chinese people at home and abroad. His view on Chineseness raises questions about when, where and on whom the notion of Chinese was being deployed—a power dynamic that is inseparable from both domestic and foreign politics. All in all, the players studied in this chapter come from a variety of geographical places. They were constantly mediating and translating notions of contemporary Chinese art that had been circulated in multilayered spaces where they were all in a complex and dynamic relationship with the others. In such a landscape, there was no single ‘key holder’ assessing and maintaining the quality of contemporary Chinese art. Instead, these players collectively executed their tasks, always finding themselves at a crossroads between self-persuasion, instrumental careerism and China’s status quo at distinct times.

References Nittve, Lars. 2013. Sigg art collection the foundation for world-class M+ museum. South China Morning Post, March 11. https://www.scmp.com/ comment/insight-opinion/article/1188880/sigg-art-collection-foundationworld-class-m-museum. Accessed 15 Oct 2022. Patterson, Christina. 2007. Cultural evolution. Time, November 29. https://con tent.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1688914,00.html. Accessed 15 Oct 2022.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion—Intervention to Existing Sociology and Art History Paradigms

In the introductory chapter, I provided an overview of the existing critical literature on contemporary Chinese art, which encompasses various frameworks like stylistic analysis, artist-based case studies, exhibition-based studies, periodisation, institutional studies, the East– West dichotomy and the impact of globalisation. Throughout the development of this field, three fundamental questions have persisted. Firstly, how can artworks and artistic processes in China be methodologically described, taking into account contextual factors and theoretical implications? Secondly, the need for establishing a periodisation for the term ‘contemporary’ within the Chinese context remains pressing. Lastly, it is crucial to explore the transcultural entanglements that have arisen with globalisation, prompting a critical examination of notions like ‘Chineseness’ and the ‘East–West dichotomy.’ Over the past few decades, numerous literatures have tackled these questions. While the aforementioned frameworks provide a foundational understanding of contemporary Chinese art, some prioritise specific aspects or perspectives, potentially overlooking others and limiting our ability to fully grasp the complexity and nuances of the history of contemporary Chinese art. This book’s uniqueness lies in adopting ethnography as a method and incorporating the philosophical significance of time and space to explore contemporary Chinese art. The stories revealed within © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I. Leung, Tracing Contemporary Chinese Art, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2668-8_7

137

138

I. LEUNG

this book may seem trivial, local, minor, or even gossipy, yet they shed light on overlooked aspects that existing literature has failed to fully address. In this chapter’s conclusion, I draw upon the existing literatures’ framings to highlight how my decade of ethnographic study has brought interventions to the study of contemporary Chinese art, sociology and art history. By doing so, I aim to carve out the essential insights that this book offers, showcasing the transformative potential of ethnography and its contribution to the understanding of contemporary Chinese art and its social and historical contexts.

Expanding the Notion of Formal Analysis and Aesthetic Appreciation: Exploring the Role of Individual Agency A significant part of the current literature on contemporary Chinese art focuses on formal and aesthetic analysis. These studies delve into the formal elements and visual characteristics of artworks, aiming to identify and understand their unique styles. The goal is to decode the visual language and techniques used by artists, exploring how they employ formal elements to convey meaning, express emotions and communicate ideologies. This approach often assumes that artists within specific artistic movements or periods share common objectives, engage with similar subject matter and utilise comparable techniques and styles. These movements are considered to be reflective of broader historical and cultural contexts. While artistic movements can offer a valuable framework for understanding art history and identifying common themes and trends, the relationship between an artist’s style, their intentions and the representation of broader historical and cultural contexts is far from straightforward. The ethnographic texts presented in this book illuminate the intricate and nuanced aspects of artistic practices that may not be fully captured through formal analysis or by solely relying on artistic movements as a lens to understand historical and cultural contexts. Through the stories portrayed in this book, we gain insights into the complexity of artists’ decision-making processes, their individual agency, intentions and personal narratives that shape their artistic styles and expressions. One

7

CONCLUSION—INTERVENTION TO EXISTING SOCIOLOGY …

139

significant contribution of this book lies in illustrating how the production of artworks is shaped by the networks of relationships in which artists are embedded, a dimension rarely explored in existing literature. For instance, Xu Zhen’s stories reveal how his artistic ideas, style and aesthetic ideals are deeply influenced by both the art world and economic factors underlying his practice. His work exemplifies the myriad of influences and connections, encompassing his gallery representation, production methods and the evolution of art spaces and districts over time. Merely analysing the textual meaning of Xu’s work would overlook the broader system he has created for himself and MadeIn, as well as the transformative impact of various locations, such as M50, Taopu and many others where Xu has left his mark. These locations serve as sites where multiple agencies network and collaborate, striving for co-creation opportunities. By immersing ourselves in Xu’s studio, engaging with his discourse, and exploring his extensive network, which includes individuals like Lorenz Helbling, David Quadrio, Feng Mengbo and others, it becomes evident that an artist’s style and discourse are intricately entangled with complex social dynamics that significantly contribute to the creative process. As Xu wears multiple hats, covering areas like production, distribution, art criticism and marketing, this book portrays different players often with interchangeable roles, particularly in Xu’s case. It highlights the interplay of various actors within the art world, shedding light on the dynamic and ever-evolving nature of artistic practices and their connections to social and economic forces. Going beyond the formal analysis and aesthetic appreciation found in existing literature, this book delves into the complexities of artistic movements, revealing that they are not homogeneous entities but rather composed of individuals with unique approaches that might challenge or deviate from the conventions associated with the movement. At the micro-level of individual agency, players in this field strategically adopt specific tactics to gain an edge in their social networks. While they share a common interest in contemporary art, these individual participants organise their own activities, form diverse connections and negotiate varying values, aesthetic ideals and practices as they interact in multiple domains and locations. The activities depicted in this book involve participants from different generations and geographical locations, fostering reciprocity within the expansive landscape of contemporary Chinese art. The multifaceted social agency networks described here represent a process through which individuals legitimise their positions within and

140

I. LEUNG

beyond their field, while simultaneously creating meanings and values that align with their subjective view of virtuosity. Players often challenge the status quo, tactically aiming to create opportunities for themselves, which sometimes requires apt deviations from existing social, political, ethical and aesthetic norms. This book re-examines the socio-personal and charismatic-networked games of many individuals to explore how they invent alternative practices, novel concepts and new forms of stylistic experiences to fabricate their own pleasures within the ever-expanding boundaries of the art world. The book delves into the intricacies of individual actions and interactions, illuminating the dynamic and inventive nature of the art world. Here, players continuously shape and reshape the evolving discourse, styles and movements of art.

Rethinking Periodisation---A Historical Picture of the ‘Contemporary Epoch’ Another common question concerning contemporary Chinese art revolves around the periodisation of the term ‘contemporary’ within the Chinese context. Many existing literatures focus on categorising and dividing Chinese art movements, practices, and artistic developments into distinct chronological periods. This involves identifying significant shifts, themes, and artistic practices within specific time frames to understand the evolution and development of contemporary art in China. By doing so, these literatures aim to discern how contemporary Chinese art is influenced by historical, political, and cultural factors. While the term ‘contemporary Chinese art’ has been widely adopted to distinguish the present from the past, the stories presented in this book do not merely culminate from events that organically followed the so-called ‘contemporary shift.’ Instead, the rupture of Chinese art as portrayed in this book indicates a significant continuity between the different locations explored within these narratives. Within both the refurbished Qing dynasty museum and the newly constructed exhibition spaces owned by billionaires, the past retains its profound significance in contemporary China, where art continues to play a pivotal role in larger power structures. Despite being rebranded as a museum of contemporary art, Rockbund Museum in Chapter 2 maintains the power of recounting art as an instrumental tool, a concept originally introduced by the British during the late Qing dynasty. Similarly, in Chapter 3, at Long Museum, artworks produced in the past, span-

7

CONCLUSION—INTERVENTION TO EXISTING SOCIOLOGY …

141

ning from imperial to revolutionary times, are rendered as favourable testaments to the city’s efforts in the name of urbanism and financial gain. These private museums are conceptualised as ideal representations, catering to contemporary and presentist agendas. Furthermore, in Chapter 4, art districts like M50, West Bund, Taopu and Red Town have breathed new life into spaces that once housed oil tanks, wharves, garment, aircraft and steel factories dating back to the early 1900s. The revitalised locations not only showcase the historical achievements of the Qing dynasty, Maoist and Dengist eras but also create endearing associations with the past. As a result, contemporary art finds itself entangled in specific power dynamics, which contributes to the continuous reinvention of the present. This book weaves together stories where the past and present intertwine intricately, challenging the notion of a straightforward ‘contemporary shift’ that always progresses with a clear beginning and end. Instead, it reveals how what occurred before and after this shift are integral parts of the same historical continuum. As various places experience construction, refurbishment and demolition, art, ranging from ancient to contemporary, undergoes radical transformations, accompanied by the evolving discourses associated with these locations and the objects displayed within them. Amidst these changes, a constant element emerges—a well-illustrated progression organised through the economic and social systems of different eras, widely acknowledged in the existing literature. By employing an ethnographic approach and re-examining time and space, this book brings to light overlooked aspects of Chinese art history. The stories presented in this book denote that time and space are instrumental in the exercise of power. Consequently, it opens a doorway to alternative, interweaving narratives that traverse both the past and the present of Chinese Art, presenting alternative voices that potentially disrupt the prevailing historical narratives within this particular milieu.

Expanding Beyond Institutions and Urban Studies: Embracing a Broader Topology of Spaces Another group of literatures concerning contemporary Chinese art centres on institutions, particularly museums. They delve into the organisational models, cultural policies and practices of museums, examining how these institutions establish norms. By studying the role of museums and key actors, they explore collaborative networks, social relationships

142

I. LEUNG

and shared conventions that influence the art world’s functioning. While these aspects are important, they seem to provide an incomplete picture of non-artworld factors at play. The narratives presented in this book demonstrate that art does not exist in isolation but is shaped by larger contextual forces. The analytical framework of topology allows us to explore the interconnectedness and relationality of various elements, going beyond a narrow focus on formal institutional structures. Rather than solely studying museums and art districts, the stories portrayed in this book reveal a broader topology of spaces and consider the interlinkages between locations. This approach helps gain insights into the ways in which spatial configurations and interactions influence social practices and lived experiences. By adopting a more holistic view of the art ecosystem, we can better understand the multifaceted nature of contemporary Chinese art and its interconnectedness with broader societal contexts. Chapter 2 delves into the exploration of Rockbund Museum and its surrounding spaces, encompassing restaurants, heritage buildings, shopping malls, promenades and interconnected locations. This examination reveals the influential role of the city government in shaping new lifestyles through private real estate and art projects. Museums engineer a new reality that manifests art as commodities for present-oriented cultural experiences and social life. The boundaries of museums continue to expand, informing a new form of governance. In such a location, art and exhibitions must be contextualised within the broader setting of the museum. Similarly, in Chapter 3, the Long Museum emerges as a timeless space, offering a heterotopic vision that blends diverse contents and sensitivities. By combining red art and contemporary art within the same space, the museum creates an environment of constant renewal, where objects evolve in their meanings. Employing a descriptive strategy to study the spatial configurations of the location, including its built environment, architectural features and the arrangement of elements in the Long Museum’s promenade, reveals the purposeful design that accommodates art, sports, heritage and various social activities. In Chapter 4, the trajectory of MadeIn Gallery, moving from the former French Concession area to Moganshan Road, and eventually settling in West Bund, Jing’an District and Qufu Road, exemplifies the profound impact of Shanghai’s extensive relocation, demolition and construction of art districts on the art scene over time. Chapter 5 delves into the intricate web of production, distribution and consumption of art

7

CONCLUSION—INTERVENTION TO EXISTING SOCIOLOGY …

143

orchestrated by Xu’s studio, his gallery and Helbling’s business, unveiling a multiplicity of interconnected relations. Actors in the art world are in a constant process of redefining their territories in response to changes in spaces while forging connections with other nodes of power. These compelling stories reveal how the art world is continually shaped and reshaped by the interplay of various actors and spatial dynamics. Throughout this book, diverse locations have emerged at different points in time, deliberately arranged to facilitate specific spatial activities within formulaic relationships. The topological approach utilised here emphasises that spatial configurations are not isolated entities but exist in multiple dimensions and scales. This approach constructs a new rationale for everyday life, intersecting personal and public needs. These cases serve as an illustration of how ethnographic studies of locations, physical structures, spaces and built environments are crucial in understanding art and its intricate relationship with social interactions and power dynamics. It becomes evident that the notion of space is far from static, as illustrated by the stories presented. Temporal dimensions, including history, memory and social change, intersect and overlap with various locations, giving rise to complex geographies of interconnections through time. The topological approach employed in this book uncovers the intricate interplay between people, their spatial surroundings and time. By exploring these relationships, we gain deeper insights into the multifaceted nature of art and its interactions within broader societal contexts.

Rethinking Globalisation and East/West Dichotomy Globalisation and the East/West dichotomy hold considerable importance for art historians analysing contemporary Chinese art. They delve into how contemporary Chinese art is positioned within the global landscape and the impact of globalisation on Chinese artistic practices, ushering in new forms of expression. Nevertheless, some of these works tend to treat global processes as universally applicable, disregarding the intricate complexities of local contexts. While these texts chronicle global exhibitions and the involvement of Chinese artists in international events, they often overlook the diverse array of local experiences and perspectives, leading to the homogenisation and marginalisation of local voices. In response to the limitations of viewing the East and the West in binary terms, scholars have advocated for a transcultural and transnational

144

I. LEUNG

approach, acknowledging the interconnected and fluid nature of cultural exchanges in our globalised world. This book makes a contribution by illustrating how local settings serve as integral nodes within global networks. It sheds light on the convergence of global flows of capital, discourses and actors in these settings, and examines how local players actively engage with and contest the power dynamics resulting from these global interactions. It dispels the notion that local economies, social structures and cultural landscapes are mere passive recipients of global flows, revealing instead their active participation in complex interactions. By exploring how institutions and individuals adapt and respond to the ever-changing circumstances within the dynamics of globalisation, this book unveils the intricacies of their role in shaping the contemporary art world. In Chapter 2, the involvement of Liu and Wang in an auction for red art serves as an illustration of how global flows of artworks intersect with local agendas. They acquire artworks from around the world that represent China’s modern history on a massive scale and exhibit them in a museum, showcasing the nation’s integrity and their patriotism locally. Meanwhile, at the Yuz Museum, exhibitions featuring renowned artists like KAWS, Cattelan, Giacometti and Warhol, sourced from various global locations, bring the essence of ‘elsewhere’ to the local setting, fostering a sense of immediacy and global connectivity. Through this process, the museum establishes itself as a credible global site. Additionally, in Chapter 4, various institutions from the West, such as Lehmann Maupin, David Zwirner, Gagosian, Perrotin, Christie’s and Center Pompidou, venture into Shanghai as new spaces continue to open up. Chapter 4 delves into Feng Mengbo’s narratives, particularly his involvement with Hong Kong during the 1990s, shedding light on how the emergence of new spaces in different cities played a pivotal role in shaping contemporary Chinese art in the era of globalisation. Before the explosive economic boom, when Shanghai and other mainland Chinese cities lacked accessible museums and galleries, Hong Kong served as a mediator and offshore hub for contemporary Chinese art. The city’s free trade policies and associated strategies influenced economic decisions in various regions, including the establishment of Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen, as experienced by Lise Li during her time working there while Shanghai was still in the process of opening up. In the pre-2000s era, when mainland China’s art infrastructure was underdeveloped, Feng’s historical trajectory reveals that contemporary Chinese art mainly found

7

CONCLUSION—INTERVENTION TO EXISTING SOCIOLOGY …

145

exhibition spaces in foreign museums like the Center Pompidou and galleries in Hong Kong, such as Hanart TZ Gallery. However, as contemporary Chinese art gained institutionalisation, art activities dispersed from the West and Hong Kong to mainland Chinese cities, fostering diverse relationships among the government, private collectors, real-estate companies and business owners. Uli Sigg and Lorenz Helbling’s stories illustrate this phenomenon. Sigg’s major exhibition in the late 1990s marked the beginning of contemporary Chinese art in a transnational setting, while Helbling initiated his career in Hong Kong around the same time until his gallery evolved with the establishment of M50. The cultural and monetary value of Sigg’s collection and Helbing’s business benefited significantly from the growth of local creative industries that incorporated contemporary Chinese art into the everyday lives of people in China. This phenomenon opened new opportunities for individuals in various professions, prompting them to respond, adapt and reinvent Shanghai’s art world. The dynamic interplay between the art world and various stakeholders reflects the evolving nature of artistic practices and the broader global art landscape. The presence of a robust art infrastructure in Shanghai after 2000 attracted attention and resources, encouraging the dispersion of art practices beyond traditional Western art centres. This transformation showcases the ongoing growth and influence of contemporary Chinese art within the global art scene. In Chapter 6, Zhang Ga’s stories highlight the complexity and multidirectional nature of the flow of resources and discourses between the East and the West. Contrary to the assumption of unidirectional influence, media art in China undergoes transformation and implementation that often diverges from the original intent. Zhang’s project exemplifies how knowledge from the art domain is adopted and utilised in various creative industries, contributing to a productive framework. These activities and discourses span across different spatial scales within a global process, rooted in various local contexts and agendas, such as the Beijing International New Media Art Exhibition and Symposium during the Beijing Olympics and the eARTS Festival during the World Expo. Art is increasingly promoted as a spectacle to enhance the country’s soft power, cultural influence and international image. Notably, the notion of globalisation is not always coherent and straightforward. Throughout the book, other stories, like Lai Hsiangling’s attempt to use a Western model to run a museum and Biljana Ciric’s efforts to promote contemporary art in a state-run museum, also demonstrate the challenges faced

146

I. LEUNG

by various players. Success and failure coexist, and art often deviates from the original intentions of the individuals involved. These instances underscore the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the art world, where art is continuously influenced, transformed and shaped by a multitude of actors, agendas and local contexts. The book’s narratives illustrate the intricate interplay between global and local dynamics, challenging simplistic notions of globalisation and emphasising the adaptability and resilience of art in navigating complex power structures and discourses. The incoherency and deviation depicted in this book reveal the intricate, unpredictable and diverse nature of global processes, challenging the notion of a well-ordered, linear and predictable system often presented in mainstream narratives about globalisation in contemporary Chinese art. These instances provide valuable insights into how global processes are encountered, negotiated and resisted at the local level, emphasising that ‘local’ or ‘micro’ perspectives are not subservient to the ‘global’ or ‘macro’ but hold an equally significant role in shaping our reality. Through these accounts, we gain a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between global and local forces, and the multifaceted ways in which they shape the artistic landscape and cultural dynamics.

Intervening Existing Knowledge in Sociology and Art History In his book Jottings from the Studio of the Chan of Painting, canonical Ming painter and theorist Dong Qichang stated, ‘Travelling brings about far greater benefit than mere book learning’ (Dong and Yin 2012). My decade-long ethnographic study of the current art world in China did not just offer me a unique life experience, it also gave me the opportunity to rediscover contemporary Chinese art. This experience also helped me gain fresh perspectives and knowledge. The term ‘contemporary Chinese art’ now conjures up entirely different connotations than it did when I first saw Wu Hung’s Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century at the University of Chicago in 1999. Over the years, my learning and unlearning have placed more emphasis on newly built spaces, everyday experience and pragmatic routine than they have on the ideologies, styles and periods I previously learned about the topic. It was a valuable act of meaning-making and a process of self-making to be able to give myself a chance to immerse in a range of art locations as both an observer and a participant.

7

CONCLUSION—INTERVENTION TO EXISTING SOCIOLOGY …

147

My everyday experiences in contemporary China’s art world have given me insights into how contemporary museums, art districts and art spaces have defined stakeholders in common, engaged them in shared activities and shaped their formation of a (collective) self. This method also helped me read spatial histories and ethnographic materials from a holistic perspective of temporality, rather than just as chronological facts and happenings. The book’s depiction of the ‘existential interrelatedness’ of different times over a decade inspired me to evaluate the current art world by revisiting earlier periods. The study of diverse spaces, and interactions between different actors, revealing the complex networks and social dynamics that influence what is known as contemporary Chinese art. This ethnographic lens disrupts the notion of art as solely driven by individual genius and understand a multifaceted view of the art ecosystem across time. Emphasising non-linearity and non-hierarchy, the ethnographic texts shed light on marginal and micro stories, accentuate the agency of actors and highlight the performative aspects that shape the art world’s social dynamics, thus offering alternative perspectives. This book challenges conventional assumptions about contemporary Chinese art, unveiling its multiplicity and contingency of knowledge. It reevaluates the significance of the market economy’s opening in 1978, often deemed a pivotal moment, by recognising it as a change in the dispersion of discourse of art and power within newly formed spaces, rather than a straightforward progression. In conclusion, the book adopts an ethnographic approach and leverages various critical theories to bring a more comprehensive and humancentred perspective to the study of sociology and art history. This intervention reveals the intricacies of artistic practices and the social dynamics influencing them, thereby enriching the knowledge produced in these disciplines.

What Does the Future Hold? The project’s fieldwork came to an end as the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. In recent years, everything seems to have been impacted by the pandemic. This gave the de-globalisation trend even more momentum because trade and human migration have both been fiercely affected. Many claim that as geopolitical tensions rise, the golden time of economic

148

I. LEUNG

interdependence between China and the West has gone. China’s position in the world and the notion of China’s rise have been greatly reconsidered. What, then, is the future of contemporary Chinese art? In Chapter 4, gallerist Lise Li stated that she embraced the opportunities brought by China’s continued economic growth because she believed that the cultural and economic value of art is more or less a function of a nation’s economic standing than of the quality of the work produced. What if China’s infinite economic growth is not only a myth but a fact that evident contraction is already unfolding and contesting? Although it is unclear whether China’s rise will last forever, one thing is certain: multidimensional fragility is clearly seen in the global supply chain, local economies, foreign and domestic politics and, as a matter of fact, the art world. It is apparent from this book’s various stories that many museums, art districts and art spaces rose and fell quickly. Under the current backdrop, it is logical to predict that many places will soon be transformed and repurposed, if not destroyed again. The dynamics between China and the rest of the world will continue to be complex, and change will remain constant and widespread. In Chapter 5, Uli Sigg questioned why China should not have one of the most vibrant art scenes in the world, given the country’s massive population, capital and abundance of talent. He thought that artists ultimately held the key to the future of art. As said earlier, there is no such thing as an origin or an end. In the constantly shifting locations, contemporary Chinese art will undoubtedly be enacted and re-enacted here and there. For me, for better or worse, what remains fascinating about contemporary Chinese art is the people and what they do. Long before any museums, art districts and art spaces emerged in China, artists had already unapologetically been making contemporary Chinese art.

Reference Dong, Qichang and Xiaofeng Yin. 2012. Jottings from the Studio of the Chan of Painting. Shanghai: Hua dong shi fan da xue chu ban she.

Index

A Abramovi´c, Marina, 36 Actor-network, 112 Ai, Weiwei, 92, 101 Alexandria, Justine, 55–58, 60 Alternative, 8, 37, 40, 75, 77, 101, 116, 118, 125, 126, 129, 134, 140, 141, 147 Ambrozy, Lee, 93 Architecture, 23, 45, 76, 86 Ars Electronica, 126, 130 Art-Ba-Ba, 100, 103 Art Basel, 54, 66, 68 Asia Society, 92 Avant-garde, 3–5, 25, 124

Berlin, 128, 129 Beuy, Joseph, 29 Billionaire, 43, 44, 56, 59, 64, 86, 140 BizArt, 67, 86, 89, 100, 101, 110, 125, 126, 134 Black box, 2, 8 Blue-chip, 31, 48, 69, 86 Boers, Waling, 83 Borysevicz, Mathieu, 34 Bottom up, 13 Bourgeois, Louise, 47–50, 59 British, 19, 23, 39, 105, 140 Bund, 19, 22–25, 32, 34, 90, 107, 109, 113

B Barbican Centre, 53 Beijing, 5, 14, 23, 27, 65, 67, 74, 76, 77, 80, 94, 95, 118, 126, 129, 134 Berkeley Art Museum, 120

C Cai, Guoqiang, 28, 33 Cattelan, Maurizio, 54, 55, 57–59, 144 Centre Pompidou, 2, 56, 66 Chang, Johnson, 69, 70

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I. Leung, Tracing Contemporary Chinese Art, Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2668-8

149

150

INDEX

Changning District, 64 Charismatic-networked game, 112, 113, 140 Chengguan, 23 Chen, Lvsheng, 49–52 China Club, 68–70 Chinese abstraction, 4 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 19, 21 Chineseness, 116, 132, 135, 137 Chipperfield, David, 23 Christie’s, 34, 47, 144 Chronological, 7, 11, 140, 147 Ciric, Biljana, 93, 115, 116, 122–126, 133, 134, 145 Cohen, Joan Lebold, 118 Collective, 5, 47, 74, 83, 96, 101, 115, 128, 135, 147 Contemporary turn, 3 Contingencies, 11 Continuity, 7, 39, 49, 140 COVID-19, 73, 147 Creative industry, 96, 131 Culp, Samantha, 74 Cultural Bureau, 122 Cultural economy, 43 Cultural industry, 111, 120, 131 Cultural Revolution, 3, 44, 48, 50, 51, 59, 90, 118, 127 Curatorial, 32–35, 40, 54, 56, 57, 116, 123, 132 Cynical realism, 4 D Davide, Quadrio, 67, 100 DDM Warehouse, 74, 75, 77, 116 De-globalisation, 147 Dehaene, Alexia, 99 Deitch, Jeffrey, 54 Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 103 Deng, Xiaoping, 7, 10, 64, 78, 85, 105, 108, 109, 117

Derridean, 7 Deutsche Bank, 80 Dia Art Foundation, 54 Diaspora, 6 Ding, Yi, 70, 75, 96, 126 Disciplinary power, 19, 20 Discourse, 6, 9, 12, 19, 20, 33, 34, 39, 40, 116, 122, 132, 133, 139–141, 144–147 Discursive, 6, 12, 44, 47, 60, 64 Don Gallery, 72, 73, 86 Duolun Museum, 116, 122

E eARTS Festival, 116, 126, 131, 145 Edouard Malingue Gallery, 72, 73 Eliasson, Olafur, 65 Emin, Tracey, 102 Epochal, 11 Ethical, 40, 50, 140 Ethnographic, 2, 12, 85, 138, 141, 143, 146, 147 Everyday life, 10, 13, 60, 143 Existential, 11, 147 Expatriates, 14, 36, 57, 95, 104 Experimentation, 47, 111, 126

F Feminist, 6, 59 Feng, Mengbo, 15, 67–70, 72, 85, 139, 144 Ferguson Lane, 74, 75 12th Five-Year Plan, 65, 66 Foucault, Michel, 6, 10, 11, 13, 47, 59 Four Seasons Hotel, 106 French Concession Area, 63, 67, 142 Friendship Store, 118 Fujimoto, Sou, 52 Fuxing Park, 95, 97, 110

INDEX

G Gagosian Gallery, 66, 144 Gender, 6 Germany, 128 Giacometti, Alberto, 54, 59, 144 Globalisation, 2, 8, 115, 133, 135, 137, 143–146 Gormley, Antony, 65 Guangdong Times Museum, 116 Guanxi, 58, 68, 81 Guardian Auctions, 47, 51 Guattari, FélixGuattari, Félix, 15, 103

H Hadid, Zaha, 74 Hanart TZ Gallery, 69, 70, 85, 145 Han Dynasty, 122 Hauser & Wirth, 48 Heidegger, Martin, 8–11 Helbling, Lorenz, 83, 89, 92–97, 103, 104, 108, 110, 112, 139, 143, 145 Heritage, 23, 24, 27, 35, 40, 60, 75, 132, 142 Heterotopia, 59 Hipsters, 32, 34, 36 Hirst, Damien, 29, 65, 92 Historiography, 7 History of the present, 10, 11 Hollywood, 25, 53 Hong Kong, 1, 2, 14, 15, 24, 26, 35, 47, 66–70, 73, 76, 79, 83, 85, 86, 93–95, 105, 109, 119, 126, 144, 145 Hongkou District, 116 Horn, Rebecca, 128 Hou, Hanru, 31, 33 Hsieh, Ramen, 32, 33, 35, 38, 40 Huangpu River, 22, 30, 63, 86

151

I Ideology, 7, 39 Indonesian, 44 Industrial, 36, 45–47, 65, 70, 78, 86, 90, 91, 95, 96, 98, 111, 128 Instrumental, 44, 45, 64, 71, 86, 111, 135, 140, 141 Intellectual youth, 49, 50

J Jacks, Lawrence Pearsall, 46 Japan, 21 Jiang, Qing, 48 Jing’an District, 71, 73, 85, 103 Jin, Shan, 74

K Kaifeng, 20 KAWS, 54, 57, 59, 60, 144 Kwak, Min, 104–108, 112

L Lai, Hsiangling, 19, 25–28, 31–33, 40, 145 Legacy, 58, 106 Lehmann Maupin, 66, 144 Leisure, 36, 46, 47 Liao, Ella, 25, 33, 34 Liem, Michelle, 105, 107 Lifestyle, 39, 40, 43, 45–47, 60, 73, 74, 86, 105, 142 Li, Lise, 90, 144, 148 Lin, Zexu, 21 Liu, Ye, 129 Liu, Yichun, 45 Liu, Yiqian, 43, 44 Li, Vivian, 35 Locality, 9 Longhua Airport, 44, 52

152

INDEX

Long Museum, 43, 44, 48–52, 54, 56, 59, 63, 64, 140, 142 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 58 Lü, Peng, 3–5, 7, 8, 10

M M+ Museum, 119 M50, 67, 70, 85, 86, 89, 91, 95–98, 100, 110–113, 139, 141, 145 MadeIn Gallery, 66–73, 86, 99, 103, 104, 142 Mao Livehouse, 77 Mao, Zedong, 7, 48–50, 72, 127 Memories, 22, 50, 70, 135 Mianzi, 82 Miao, Ying, 70–72 Micro-interactions, 2 Ming dynasty, 49, 59 Minsheng Art Museum, 80, 81, 84, 85 MoCA Shanghai, 25 MoCA Taipei, 26 Murakami, Takashi, 100, 102 Murdoch, Wendi Deng, 97 Museum Heude, 21 Museum of Modern Art, 53

N National Art Museum, 130 Natural specimens, 19, 29, 34 Network, 12, 40, 50, 56, 58, 63, 64, 90, 95, 103, 104, 112, 113, 116, 134, 139, 141, 144, 147 New media, 130, 131 1985 New Wave Moment, 3 New York, 35, 92, 96, 128 Non-profit, 26–28, 35, 56, 73, 75, 80, 103, 110, 111, 125

O Olympic Games, 22

P Paris, 2, 34, 97 Patriotism, 49, 51, 60, 144 Payot, Marc, 48 Peninsula Hotel, 24 People’s Republic of China, 4, 19, 21, 51 Periodisation, 4, 5, 10, 137, 140 Perrotin Gallery, 34, 66, 144 Plum Blossoms Gallery, 93 Political pop, 4 Pollock, Jackson, 29 Poly Auction, 47 Pompidou Center, 126 Portman Shangri-La Hotel, 94 Post-internet art, 4 Power, 6, 12, 21, 23, 33, 34, 39, 47, 54, 56, 64, 68, 82, 86, 103, 113, 133, 135, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147 Prescencing, 9 Private museum, 13, 20, 26, 27, 31, 38, 43, 44, 52, 56–60, 65, 66, 73, 123, 141 Private non-enterprise units, 20 Professionalism, 28, 38, 134 Propaganda, 7, 24, 49, 50, 59 Pudong, 32, 43, 50, 51, 108, 109

Q Qiao, Zhibing, 65 Qing dynasty, 10, 19–21, 38, 39, 140, 141 Qiu, Zhijie, 15, 67, 82

INDEX

R Real-estate, 14, 23–25, 27, 35, 40, 56, 64, 71, 72, 75, 79, 80, 84, 86, 121, 123, 145 Red Gate Gallery, 94 Red Town, 63, 64, 74–78, 80, 84–86, 141 Rhizomic, 15 Ritz-Carlton Hotel, 94 Rockbund Museum, 11, 12, 116, 123, 125, 140, 142 Rockefeller, 26 Rondinone, Ugo, 33 Royal Asiatic Society, 21 Rupture, 3, 7, 38, 140 S San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 129 Schindhelm, Michael, 119 Selfhood, 60 Serpentine Gallery, 52 798, 76 Shanghai, 2, 5, 12–14, 22–26, 28, 32, 33, 44–46, 52–55, 58, 63–65, 67–81, 83, 84, 86, 89–95, 97–100, 103–106, 108, 109, 112, 113, 116, 122, 125, 126, 129, 131, 134, 144, 145 Shanghai Biennial, 122 Shanghai Exhibition Center, 66, 109 Shanghai Gallery of Art (SGA), 89, 90, 104, 105, 107, 108 Shanghai Himalayas Art Museum, 123 Shanghai Museum, 11, 19, 21–23, 29, 30, 33, 38, 39, 70 Shanghai Sculpture Space, 76 Shanghart Gallery, 70, 73, 89 Shangtex, 89, 91, 97 SH Contemporary, 66 Shen, Jiawei, 48, 49 Shen, Qibin, 122

153

Shenzhen, 5, 65, 90, 108, 109, 144 Sigg, Uli, 92, 115–122, 126, 133, 135, 145, 148 Smith, Karen, 5, 54 Soft power, 20, 120, 124, 145 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 57 Sotheby’s, 47 Spatial, 12, 39, 40, 45, 46, 64, 85, 86, 113, 134, 142, 143, 145, 147 Spiritual, 44 Sponsorship, 57, 124 Stakeholders, 14, 28, 39, 145, 147 Stars Art Exhibition, 127, 133 State-owned, 71, 78, 89, 91, 96, 98, 101, 118, 122–124, 134 Subjective, 60, 135, 140 Subjectivity, 44, 49 Sun, Jiwei, 45 Super-system, 8 Swissôtel, 117, 122 Switzerland, 93, 117

T Tang, David, 70 Tank Shanghai, 65, 66 Taopu Village, 90, 91 Tek, Budi, 44, 55–58, 60 Three on the Bund, 105–107, 112 Tinari, Philip, 92 Today Art Museum, 3, 27 Topology, 9, 12, 15, 142 Tse, Nicolas, 76

U UBS, 66, 80 Urbanisation, 5, 30, 31, 40, 64, 70, 133 Urban regeneration, 43

154

INDEX

V Vanguard Gallery, 89, 90, 108 Virtuosity, 140 Vongerichten, Jean-Georges, 106 von Hornsleth, Kristian, 74 W Wang, Bing, 35 Wang, Jianwei, 67 Wang, Wei, 43 Weibo, 36 West Bund, 43–45, 52, 56, 63–67, 70, 71, 73, 84–86, 99, 103, 134, 141, 142 West Bund Art Center, 66, 71, 73 Whitney Museum of American Art, 57 World Expo, 22, 23, 27, 30, 31, 40, 84, 86, 145 Wu, Hung, 1, 3, 57, 99, 146 Wu, Shanzhuan, 101 X Xiaohongshu, 36 Xuhui District, 56, 71 Xu, Jiyu, 20 Xu, Wenkai, 15, 74, 86

Xu, Zhao, 47 Xu, Zhen, 67, 68, 72, 89, 90, 98, 99, 116, 125, 139 Y Yang, Fudong, 15, 92, 98, 103 Yang, Zhenzhong, 98, 103, 125 Yan-huang Art Museum, 80 Yu, Youhan, 75 Yuz Museum, 44, 52, 54, 56, 57, 59, 63–65, 144 Z Zendai Museum of Modern Art, 123 Zeng, Fanzhi, 31, 33, 69 Zhang, Ding, 92, 103 Zhang, Ga, 115, 126, 145 Zhang, Huan, 6 Zhang, Lehua, 74 Zhang, Peili, 5, 15, 67, 83, 101 Zhang, Xiaogang, 5, 69 Zheng, Peiguang, 78, 84 Zheng, Weimin, 74, 77, 83, 86, 116 Zheng, Yunhan, 74 Zhu, Rongji, 64, 78 Zwirner, David, 66