Art

London is addicted to Chinese art. No longer just a trend, it’s steadily becoming an integral part of the capital’s cultural outlook. Just look at the city’s key arts institutions. Many are going to extraordinary lengths to nurture sustainable, ongoing relationships with those who they hope will come to represent key Chinese talent.

Over the past ten or 15 years, Chinese contemporary art has gone from being barely existent – due to the suppression of free expression under Mao and his successors, when artists would hastily assemble exhibitions in garages only to have them shut down by the police within hours – to achieving phenomenal global popularity, evidenced in a spate of survey shows in museums around the world and spectacularly escalating prices. UK galleries, museum curators and collectors have been quick to capitalise. The rewards have been huge, not least in public attendance figures. Last year’s show of Chinese contemporary art at Battersea Power Station had queues stretching daily around the block.
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For high-end, well-established Chinese artists, the initial shift in interest has been evident in auction house sales. Since 2001, major institutions such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s have picked up on the developing market, auctioning works by Chinese artists who rose to fame in the 1990s. Typical works fell into two categories: ‘cynical realism’ (a distant, sometimes humorous take on the political and social realities of modern China) and ‘political pop’ (which often juxtaposes socialism with corporate capitalism – Maoist propaganda next to Coca-Cola logos).

Phillips and Bonhams followed suit. Due to expertise in more antique Chinese furniture and art objects, Bonhams, like many auction houses, already had links with Hong Kong and contacts in mainland China, and by holding its first auctions in Hong Kong this year, has consolidated its position to deal with the surging market.

By 2005 auction houses were holding devoted Asian contemporary sales. Yet perhaps more importantly, Chinese artists started to be included in the money-spinning contemporary evening sales, described by Sotheby’s contemporary art specialist Alexander Branczik as being ‘for museum-quality works only’, alongside such masters as Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon or Jeff Koons. This demonstrated, as Branczik points out, that it was no longer just for those specifically interested in Chinese contemporary art, but was ‘well-integrated into high-end contemporary art collections’.

Certainly price-wise, cynical realist and political pop art – typified by the kitschy Maos or workers with impenetrably smiling or masked expressions – can hold their own. Last June, Sotheby’s London sold a painting by Yue Minjun, called ‘The Pope’ (1997) for £2.1 million – a record for a Chinese contemporary artwork at auction. This October, both Christie’s and Sotheby’s in London will offer works by these pricey avant-garde-cum-blue-chip artists, such as Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun and Zeng Fanzhi. Yue Minjun’s ‘Execution’ (1995) – a politically charged piece featuring blankly smiling Chinese men facing a firing squad, modelled after Manet’s nineteenth-century masterpiece, ‘The Execution of Emperor Maximilian’ – has the season’s highest estimate at £1.5m-£2m.

These days such artists are represented by top London galleries – Haunch of Venison, Hauser & Wirth and Albion – with high-end international stables. For most serious galleries, regular trips to China, to keep abreast of new artists and developments, has become de rigueur. ‘We probably go to China three or four times a year,’ says Michael Hue-Williams, owner of the Albion, which represents six different artists from China and Taiwan, ‘but it’s not Chinese artists we’re after per se, we’re interested in great artists – no matter what country they come from.’

Haunch of Venison, currently showing important Chinese artist Zhang Huan, is also doing lots of legwork. ‘This year alone five different people from the gallery have been out to China,’ says associate director Matt Carey-Williams. ‘Since January I’ve been five times. People there value personal contact – that’s how deals get closed.’

Collectors, some of whom claim to have made more money on the art market in recent years than on the stock market, are hot on the galleries’ tails in visiting China, affirming their interest with hard cash. Charles Saatchi, an early proponent of turning good collecting into good business, has put together a large collection of Chinese artists, mostly painters and sculptors – including Zhang Huan, Yue Minjun, and Shi Xinning – and plans to open his new space at the Duke of York’s Headquarters off the Kings Road in Chelsea with a show of their works in 2008. Perhaps even more interestingly, however, Saatchi has clearly sought to make himself and his gallery well-known within China itself. His entire, extensive website is translated into Chinese. This includes articles and other resources – but especially successful has been the section in which artists can upload their own works to show and be discovered. More than 10,000 Chinese artists and students are now exhibiting on the Saatchi website.

Yet as with any art movement, this commercial activity would not thrive without museum and curators’ support of the artists. In the UK, both Tate and the Serpentine Gallery have committed relatively extensive resources and time to gaining sophisticated knowledge of Chinese contemporary art. In both cases, their recent exhibitions went far beyond the already well-known works from the ’90s, demonstrating the rapidly changing and complex landscape of Chinese art. Video and a new, more poetic sensibility dominated the extraordinary, if at times awkward, installation of ‘China Power Station’, the Serpentine Gallery’s Chinese contemporary show held at Battersea Power Station, including works by Cao Fei, Lu Chunsheng and Qui Anxiong.

Titled ‘The Real Thing’, the recent show at Tate Liverpool – put together by Tate curator Simon Groom in collaboration with China-based curator Karen Smith and Chinese artist Xu Zhen, also pushed the boundaries, incorporating a variety of media, and striving to debunk the notion of Chinese contemporary as being synonymous with ’90s cynical realist and political pop paintings. Showing only works made since 2000, including artists such as Yang Fudong, He An and Ai Weiwei, most remarkable was the humour, intellect and irony of works made in response to the rapid changes within China and China’s relationship with the international community. In both the Serpentine and Tate shows, the variety and breadth of work signalled a new generation – less easily defined as a trend or movement – making strong works of international appeal. The Tate has also formed an Asia Pacific Acquisitions Committee specifically to keep well on top of developments.

That sense of an artistic scene in the process of rapid evolution is just one reason why the West will continue to flock to China. There’s also the sense that now is a crucial time for making acquisitions: recent statistics indicate that there are more than 300,000 Chinese millionaires, with new ones made every day. At the recent Shanghai Art Fair the consensus was that still relatively few mainland Chinese people were buying, perhaps discouraged by the prohibitive 34 per cent sales tax slapped on imported artworks by the Chinese government, and certainly because in financial terms the majority of the population are nowhere near the tiny, wealthy elite. But according to Alexander Branczik, the number of Chinese buyers at auction – at the moment primarily for Chinese art – is ‘growing every day’, and ‘becoming an important part of Sotheby’s clientele’. With Taiwanese, Koreans and Hong Kong Chinese already building substantial international collections, the feeling is that once mainland Chinese collectors start buying, London needs to be ready.

Pernilla Holmes is a freelance arts journalist.