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Abstract
Contemporary art by Chinese artists was, before the financial crash of 2008, one of the fastest growing areas of the art market. In the period 2000 to 2012 a substantial number of exhibitions and texts were dedicated to the art of those working with lens-based media. In this way “Contemporary Chinese Photography” has emerged as a subset of contemporary art from China. Despite the fact that much of what has been written in the last forty years about the politics of representation would suggest that it is unsound to have a category of art production determined by the makers’ ethnicity, there is a great deal of actual and symbolic investment in this particular branch of contemporary art. A dominant idea at work in much of the secondary literature that seeks to introduce Westerners to the subject is that in viewing these works we are learning something about modern China and its inhabitants. This article argues that if this art appears legible to us, then one reason for this is because it has been made so by its art world interpreters and, in the process, become market-friendly.
Notes
1 The report goes on to say: “Of the 35 Contemporary artists that have achieved seven-digit sales, 15 are now Chinese”, Art Market Trends, 18. According to this report, 2007 was the year in which China moved into third place behind the United States and the United Kingdom in terms of turnover of “Fine Art Auction” sales, relegating France to fourth position; 18.
2 China’s New Photography was curated by Shu Yang for the second Pingyao International Photography Festival in 2002; A Strange Heaven (Acret) is the exhibition catalogue to the show at the Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, 2003; Zooming into Focus (Yapelli) is the catalogue to the show that toured to five cities in the US including San Diego, and to Shanghai Art Museum 2004, the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, 2004, to Singapore and to the Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico; Between Past and Future (Hung and Phillips) is the catalogue to the show that began at the ICP in 2004 and toured to Chicago, Seattle, London, Berlin and Santa Barbara; also in 2004, there was the exhibition The Chinese: Photography and Video from China at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, and its accompanying catalogue (van Tuyl et al.); Out of the Red (Marella et al.) was published in 2004; also that year Spellbound Aura — The New Vision of Chinese Photography was staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan; in 2007 Whispering Wind: Recent Chinese Photography was shown at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville; Photography from the New China was at the Getty Center in 2010–11; Rising Dragon: Contemporary Chinese Photography was at the Katonah Museum of Art, New York, in spring 2012 (and toured to the San José Museum of Art, California, in early 2013); the catalogue of the same name is by Miles Barth.
3 In a recent call for papers for a session on “Value or Prices” at the spring 2014 Association of Art Historians conference, we find the following figures quoted (without source): “auction sales of contemporary art amounted to $44 million in 1998 and represented just 1.8% of the overall secondary market. By 2008, sales had risen to $1.3 billion and consisted 15.9% of the secondary market” (Art Hist).
4 In offering facts and figures regarding the auction market in relation to the paradigm shift I identify, I am not arguing that there is a simple equation to be made between market forces and the discourse of art criticism and history or vice versa. What I am doing is arguing is that the contemporary art of China, much of which was influenced by a Western turn during the 1980s and 1990s, lends itself to an interpretative model based upon the taxonomies of contemporary art made in the West, and yet the tendency to define such works as solely informed by familiar tropes both negates for a Western audience other levels of meaning that may be at work in the art and serves to smooth the passage of trade in these objects.
5 The decision to attend to secondary literature is a function of what type of text has served to introduce an English-speaking art audience to this subject. A recent anthology begins: “During the past twenty to thirty years, contemporary Chinese art has emerged as one of the liveliest and most creative trends within international contemporary art. Many exhibitions have introduced this art to a global audience, and the number of publications about it has also grown rapidly. Except in a few cases, however, most of these publications are exhibition catalogues and picture albums” (Wu, Contemporary Chinese Art xiv).
6 Christopher Phillips, in a gallery tour of Wang Qingsong: When Worlds Collide, International Center for Photography, New York City, spring 2011.
7 In a talk at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, regarding the (then) upcoming ICP Triennial of Photography in May 2013, when asked what would be the place of Chinese photographers at the event, Christopher Phillips was frank in stating that he felt that contemporary photography and video Chinese artists were not picking up on the global trends he and his fellow curators had established for the Triennial (1 March 2013). Although the talk was delivered with a high degree of self-awareness, the idea of curator as gatekeeper was not examined. It may be worth noting in this context that Chinese contemporary art may be suffering from its association with the pre-financial crash bubble: for example, Sotheby’s London Contemporary Art auction of October 2008 saw ten out of seventeen works by Chinese artists fail to sell, in a sale that was estimated to achieve $54–75 million dollars and in fact achieved $38 million.
8 This reading is that of Christopher Phillips, gallery tour.
9 It is often suggested anecdotally that works were being made in Beijing specifically for a Western audience; it has also been suggested to me that Chinese artists were puzzled by the choices made by Western curators who visited the Dashanzi art district in Beijing (also known as “798”). I have not yet heard speculation as to whether, since East Asia has emerged as such a strong market for auction sales, Chinese artists are now making works specifically for a home audience. According to the Art Newspaper, in late November 2007 Christie’s sale of Contemporary Asian Art in Hong Kong made $60 million; a few days later in Beijing, Poly Auction House’s first evening sale, mainly comprised of modern and contemporary Chinese art, made $59.4 million and, across these two sales, “only 15% of sold lots went to Western buyers” (M.C. 47). At the 2012 Evening Sale of Asian 20th Century & Contemporary Art at Christie’s Hong Kong, the top ten lots were purchased by clients described as “Asian private” (Christie’s).
10 See Köppel-Yang for a study of contemporary art in China of the 1980s founded on an understanding of the assimilation of Western influences as producing what Stuart Hall has called “a set of cultural translations” (21).
11 The account that follows relies substantially on Wu Hung’s “brief” historical account of contemporary Chinese photography (Wu, “Between Past and Future” 2004) as, notwithstanding the brevity claimed for it, it is one of the most extensive historical accounts of the subject in English. Eleanora Battiston’s account of the period pre-1990 (Battiston 7) is similarly titled (“A Brief History of Chinese Photography”) but runs to only 25 lines of text.
12 Wu Hung argues that this documentary mode had two main strands, both with their roots in the China of the late 1970s: one was a branch of “soil art” featuring the lives of “ordinary people” and the other took its cues from the “scar art” and “scar literature” “focusing on human tragedies in Chinese society” (19).
13 Wu Hung also attributes the spread of photography-as-art to the explosion in the number of photographic journals published in China in the 1980s and to the conferences held between 1986 and 1988 (18).
14 The account I am giving here does not include any reference to photography practised as an art form in the pre-1976 period. This omission is not an example of my own historical amnesia but follows on from my focus on how the genesis of contemporary Chinese photography has been accounted for in the secondary literature of the last fifteen years.
15 The two readings that I am positing here, the historical and the contemporary, can be hybridized as is the case in “A Chronology of Contemporary Chinese Art 1976–2003” set out in (Lu Peng, in Acret 167–176). The chronology begins in 1976 and yet while the April Fifth Movement is listed under “Social Context” for that year, the album People’s Mourning is not included, and there is no mention of specifically photographic milestones such as the second Pingyao Photography Festival of 2002.
16 According to Primo Giovanni Marella, the director of the Primo Marella Gallery (Milan and Beijing), for which nine of the twenty-one artists represented are Chinese, many among this generation of artists are inspired by a dialectic between rapid change and what he calls “their traditional deep-rooted resistance to change” (Marella et al. 5). According to Marella, Out of the Red: The New Emerging Generation of Chinese Photographers developed out of the exhibition “Out of the Red: The New Upcoming Generation” curated by Marella and Alessandro Consolo in 2003, which in turn was a response to Marella’s involvement in dealing in contemporary art by Chinese artists (5). In 2007 the Primo Marella Art Gallery underwrote the costs of publishing hardback monographs on some of the Chinese artists they represent, including one on Ma Liuming and one on Huang Yan that both include text written by Eleanora Battiston (among other authors). Although the gallery representatives promote Huang as an artist and not a photographer (in conversation with the author at the stand taken by the gallery — ironically — at 2007’s Paris-Photo), the artist’s 1996 parody of Keith Arnatt’s “I’m a Real Artist” suggests that he might take a more nuanced, knowing approach to the distinction (Battiston et al. 72). Wang Qingsong is one of the artists represented by the gallery.
17 Nor do we find any commentary on the poorly punctuated title. According to one reading, the series “shows young people full of longing for the future. Real life for them is strange and remote. They are more accustomed to apathy and loneliness, and they doubt their own ideals and beliefs. Yet still they are filled with confidence that they will have a better life” (Acret 140). And to another, it “represents a group of fashionable Shanghai yuppies, including a girl and several young men. The pictures resemble film stills, but the plot that connects them remains beyond the viewer’s comprehension” (Wu Hung, ‘Contemporaneity in Experimental Chinese Photography’, 16).
18 It is very interesting to read in this context Weng’s “Artist’s Statement” printed in Out of the Red (Battiston 236). The book reproduces a large number of the On the Wall series, some of Weng’s series Family Aspirations, and one from Staring at the Sea. In his statement the only reference to the elements seen in On the Wall is the blue of the sky; the uniformity of sky and scenery that the artist sees across different Chinese cities and in the US contributes, he says, to the unreality of reality, and his longing for authentic experience.
19 For example, according to Janette Danel-Helleu, “These empty buildings reflect the way China is changing today and the fact that the Chinese have not yet accepted all the changes” (322).
20 The work was described on the website of Chinese Contemporary, the gallery that represented him, thus:
Most recently, to commenorate [sic] Chinese Contemporary’s tenth anniversary, Hong Hao created 10 Years Chinese Contemporary, a work that visually captures the past 10 years of Chinese contemporary art … A visual tour de force and a documentary work of immport [sic], 10 Years Chinese Contemporay [sic] tells the story of not only where Chinese Contemporary has been but also of the [sic] Chinese contemporary art’s journey. (Chinese Contemporary, Hong Hao)
21 This is not to overlook the many contemporary artworks that are not ambiguous, such as Thomas Hirschhorn’s The Incommensurable Banner (2007) or Alfredo Jaar’s The Sound of Silence (2006).
22 For the press release to the show at Alison Jacques Gallery featuring Yass’s Lock series see (Alison Jacques Gallery). For a short article responding to the show of Lock in 2007 at Galerie Lelong, New York, see Schwenderer. For a web review of the showing of the work at Frieze art fair see Teasdale.
23 When asked by Stephanie Smith whether he intended the work to be a critique, Wang replied, “The work raises questions for the audience to think about, but it doesn’t take a position one way or the other. The single-child family could be a good thing or a bad thing” (“Artists’ Interviews” [pp. 175–190] Wu and Phillips 184). In the “Artists’ Statements” section of the exhibition catalogue, Wang says “All my work is open-ended” ([pp. 201–221] 212). The artist is more expansive in his caption for the work printed in A Strange Heaven, in which he allows that the familial and national interests are served by the policy but at the expense of an “unimaginable reality” for the future (Acret 116).
24 State censorship of art in China is highly fascinating to Western scholars apparently nostalgic for a truly oppositional role for art. For some Chinese artists, however, censorship is about the family not the state; Chen Lingyang, for example, has been quoted as saying that if her parents knew she was picturing the naked body (hers) they would kill her (“Artists’ Interviews” [pp. 175–190] Wu and Phillips 177).
25 For a political (or politicizing) reading of Yto Barrada’s project see Downey (“Zones of Indistinction”). This contrasts with the latter’s reading of the series in terms of a poetics of killing time in Downey (“A Life Full of Holes”).
26 If we turn to Johanna Drucker’s reading of contemporary art as “complicit formalism” (xv) it might appear that I am adhering what she sees as the superannuated belief that art should not embrace commerce. But my concern is not so much with the visual strategies of the artists but instead with the interpretative strategies used to frame them.
27 The question as to whether art can be politically effective has a long and complex history which I will not rehearse here; for a summary of the “aesthetics-as-politics” model within late modernism see Drucker (6–8). For my part, I see the interpretative framing of (English-speaking) contemporary art as contributing to the wider formulation of a notional consensus regarding what it means to be “liberal” in the non-party political sense. In this way, we get “right thinking art”.
28 The exhibition The Chinese: Photography and Video from China of 2004 was sponsored by Volkswagen, whose former chairman and then board member of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg had initiated the company’s “scheme of large-scale investment” in China (van Tuyl 4). Hewlett Packard has also been active in sponsoring contemporary photography from China; for “Meeting Place FotoFest Beijing 2006”, a fair designed to bring Chinese and Western artists and art world figures into contact with one another, the company offered to print for free the work of all participating photographers. Hewlett Packard also sponsored at least two of the exhibitions of contemporary photography from China at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2007 (“Chai-Na/China” and “Gao Brothers”).
29 “A zone of freedom?” is the title of Chapter 1 of Stallabrass (1–18).
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Juliet Hacking
Juliet Hacking is the Programme Director for the MA in Photography (Historical and Contemporary) at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. She is the author of Princes of Victorian Bohemia: Photographs by David Wilkie Wynfield (National Portrait Gallery 2000) and the editor of Photography: The Whole Story (2012). Her forthcoming book Lives of the Great Photographers, for Thames & Hudson, is to be published in September 2015. She was previously the Head of Department for Photographs at Sotheby’s auction house, London.