Art Asia Pacific / Review on Lu Xinjian's exhibition

ZHOU YILUN at Fabien Fryns Fine Art

Rumor: Wu Junyong Solo Exhibition at F2 Gallery, Sep 3 - Nov 7, 2011

http://www.f2gallery.com/exhibition/view/41/

from The Economist: Chinese checkers The wild, wild world of the Chinese contemporary-art market

BUYING Chinese contemporary art is not for the faint-hearted. There are no museums in China to offer the validation that contemporary-art collectors in the West desire, and few independent critics or curators to judge whether a living artist’s work is good enough to stand the test of time. Yet that is not putting off buyers. Last year Asia accounted for nearly a quarter of global auction revenue, nearly twice what it was two years ago. Some of this can be explained by sales of wine and watches, which have a growing following among the Chinese, but the lion’s share is made up of art. Among the ten most expensive artists working today, two are Chinese—Zeng Fanzhi and Cai Guo-Qiang. Yet the Chinese contemporary-art market is extremely volatile, bidding at auctions in mainland China is often rigged and galleries follow the auction houses’ lead on prices far more than they do in the West. So how does the neophyte collector find his or her way through this jungle?

Before 2007, Chinese contemporary art was largely the province of European and American collectors who bought on the cheap and watched as prices went up. Now it is more likely to stay in Asia. Taiwan, which has some of the most mature collectors in the region, has recently acquired an appetite for contemporary art. Taiwanese taste, says Pi Li, co-owner of Boers-Li, a Beijing gallery, is “elegant” and leans towards expatriate artists like Yan Pei Ming (who lives in France) and Zhang Huan and Mr Cai (who live in New York), whereas mainland buyers like “wilder things”. Hong Kong, by contrast, is a hybrid culture, where collectors love international art, particularly Pop.

One thing Chinese collectors agree on is the superiority of painting. The highest price ever paid for a sculpture by a living mainland Chinese artist is just over $800,000 (for a stainless-steel work by Zhan Wang), less than a tenth of the highest price paid for a Chinese contemporary picture ($9.7m for a “mask” painting by Mr Zeng). “The Chinese tradition doesn’t see sculpture as real art but as anonymous craft for ritual use,” explains Lu Jie, the owner of the Long March Space, another Beijing gallery.

Most Chinese artists live in Beijing, whereas most collectors come from Shanghai, the historic financial centre. The newly rich from Shanxi province (which derives its wealth from mining) and Fujian (which has grown prosperous through trade) have recently entered the market, but their tastes veer towards the traditional, or what Philip Tinari, a Beijing-based art critic, dismisses as “realist pictures of pretty girls playing blackjack”.

Beijing is the intellectual capital of China and has a burgeoning gallery scene in its art district, which is known as 798. Contemporary dealers set up shop here to stay close to the many artists that have made Beijing their home. The best local galleries—the Long March Space, Beijing Commune and Boers-Li—are artist-driven businesses. A handful of prestigious international players—Continua, Urs Meile, Jens Faurschou and Pace Gallery—have also opened there, but these are mainly exporters. Pace has shown many Chinese artists in its New York galleries but, until recently, no Western art in China. As Arne Glimcher, Pace’s owner, says: “A Chinese audience is not going to be spoon-fed the leftovers of Western culture.”

Experiments

The artists’ community in Beijing is vibrant and competitive. Some painters and sculptors live in artists’ villages scattered around central Beijing, but many live on the outskirts in Songzhuang, a tolerant municipality where artists without Beijing residence licences or hukouben are not harassed by the police.

Contributing to this vitality is the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). One of two elite institutions (the other is the China Academy of Art located in Hangzhou), the academy admits only one in 30 applicants and has a magnetic pull on ambitious Chinese artists. CAFA used to be the pre-eminent party-controlled school; it now boasts a department of “experimental art” and most staff members lean cautiously toward liberality. Jin Hua, manager of the international office of CAFA, is a rare public supporter of Ai Weiwei. Mr Jin regards the outspoken artist’s recent 81-day imprisonment as extremely unfair and says that excessive government restriction is unsustainable. “If China wants to be the homeland of high-value goods, it has to be a country with freedom,” he says. “How can you develop a brand when you can’t even own your home?”

Many Chinese artists have become known to Westerners through their recognisable signature styles, such as Yue Minjun’s monotonous paintings of pink-faced smiling men. But the popularity of this kind of work seems to be on the wane. By contrast, Mr Zeng, China’s most successful living artist, hasn’t become stuck in a single, rigid type of painting. While Mr Zeng’s most coveted works are from his “mask” series, which were made between 1994 and 2004, his self-portraits (pictured above) also fetch high prices at auction and his abstract landscapes sell well on the primary market.

Expert craftsmanship, preferably with an overt display of time-consuming labour on the part of the artist himself, remains a driving force in Chinese contemporary art. Mr Zeng, for example, is adamant that none of his assistants is allowed to pick up a brush.

The way Mr Zeng sells his work is illustrative of a general trend. In the 1990s, Mr Zeng sold most of his paintings directly from his studio. Later he worked with a range of dealers, settling with Shanghart. Now he has signed an exclusive global deal with Larry Gagosian for all sales beyond the mainland.

As Chinese artists come to appreciate the confidence in their work that can be conferred by a strong gallery, they will start seeking integration into the global art world. The endorsement of international collectors with powerful reputations is also essential. For instance, François Pinault, a French collector with two museums in Venice, owns 15 Zeng paintings and says he sees the artist as “the Jackson Pollock of the 21st century”: the great abstract expressionist was the first American painter to gain international recognition. Mr Pinault’s foundation underwrote a solo show of recent Zeng work at Christie’s in Hong Kong and at the new Rockbund Art Museum, part of a commercial property development in Shanghai.

Museums of contemporary art with permanent collections and solid scholarship are the most important ingredient still missing from the Chinese art world. The Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing helped transform the 798 district from a desolate industrial site into a cultural destination, but it lacks the steadfastness expected of a public non-profit-making space. The centre opened in late 2007, but its Belgian benefactor, Guy Ullens, has already sold some of the best works in his collection, and he is now looking to sell off the space itself.

The one museum that could set a new standard is M+, which is due to open in Hong Kong in 2016. Headed by Lars Nittve, a well-respected curator, the project is supported by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Currently, the most professional curatorial institution in Asia is the 21st-century museum of contemporary art in Kanazawa, Japan. M+ could leapfrog Kanazawa and become the Tate Modern of the East. Much like Tate Modern, M+ is looking for collections that need a long-term home.

The most important collector of Chinese contemporary art is Uli Sigg, a businessman and former Swiss ambassador to China. Mr Sigg, who owns 3,000 works and has created the best record of Chinese art history from 1979 to the present, wants to return the art to the region. Securing the Sigg collection would do much to confirm the importance of any new institution.

The Chinese art world is developing quickly. The number of reliable dealers is growing, but the market needs bona fide collectors with the energy to do intelligent research and the commitment to stick to their choices. Buying quality art is rarely a good way to make a quick buck. The true relevance of art reveals itself over time. Good information is the key to success in the art market. In China, a cultural landscape with so few signposts, this knowledge is harder to obtain—but even more essential.

Lu Xinjian and The Absolut Art Collection

It is with great pleasure that Fabien Fryns Fine Art congratulates the artist of its current exhibition Lu Xinjian and the musician/producer B6 on the artwork “ABSOLUTELY A-MAZED” for the Absolute Blank campaign.

They teamed up to create an outstanding installation based on a map of Shanghai’s city streets. The Absolut Art Collection includes artists such as Andy Warhol, Francesco Clemente, Louise Bourgeois and Robert Indiana, to name a few!

At Longmen Art Projects, Shanghai | July 14 - July 30, 2011.

www.absolut.com/cn/blank

Also, check out Lu Xinjian’s first solo exhibition in the US from June 25 through August 27 at Fabien Fryns Fine Art, Los Angeles.

www.fabienfryns.com

Opening on Saturday June 25: paintings by Lu Xinjian at Fabien Fryns Fine Art

Lu Xinjian
City DNA III

June 25 – August 27, 2011
Opening: Saturday, June 25, 3-6 pm



Fabien Fryns Fine Art, Los Angeles, is pleased to announce Lu Xinjian’s first solo exhibition in the US from June 25 through August 27, 2011.

In Lu’s obsessively meticulous paintings of aerial views of cities on Google Earth, including San Diego, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Napa Valley and Monterey, among other places in California, Lu reconfigures architecture, landscape, human activities and infrastructure to short yet exclamatory lines, circles and squares, that are woven into continuous and colossal networks. The lively colors that are applied to these motifs generate explosive rhythms and energy against the monochromic background. City DNA San Diego, 2011, employs the color of aqua blue as the metaphorical background to reflect beaches and the surfing culture that San Diego is famous for. The vivid colors of white, yellow and fuchsia of the motifs are derived from the colors on the flag of San Diego. Circles and curvy lines symbolize nature; straight lines and squares imply man-made structures.

Lu eliminates the painting elements of perspective, light and depth; relies on color, lines and composition to fulfill his painterly vision and his interpretation of urban planning in the context of globalization and homogenization. The technique of masking adds precision to his artistic vocabulary. Lu’s abstract approach to topography decodes the places that we are familiar with. The recognizable landmarks of our environment are reduced and transformed into geometry. Only upon closer scrutiny, the viewer can discover each city’s characteristics through colors and the arrangement of the lines and shapes.

Such a reconfiguration of data can trace its history back to as early as cubism, futurism and Mondrian’s neoplasticism in the early 20th century. These movements were marked by the artists’ attempt to translate their experience of flying above an open space where the perspective was constantly shifting under the pilot’s eyes in dynamic and synthetic visual terms. Similar to the invention of aircraft, Google Earth enables Lu to survey our landscapes from a whole new perspective: optically and philosophically. For Lu, his painting is not only a device to articulate the fascinating observation from the height of a satellite on Google Earth, but also an instrument to illustrate how human societies impact the earth. Each city is devoid of its uniqueness in the web of uniformed lines and motifs, which are the metaphor for the generic blueprints of modern urban development and regulation: the DNA of cities. Lu creates his own visual language to tell the tale of a changing ecosystem. Through the process of decoding and recoding, the dividing lines between public and private, urban and rural, nature and human intervention are diminished. Each picture forms a reformatted landscape through the lens of ecology and technology.

Lu Xinjian was born in Jiangsu Province in1977. He graduated from Nanjing Arts Institute, then studied at Design Academy Eindhoven, the Netherlands. He earned his MFA from Frank Mohr Institute in the Netherlands in 2006. Lu now lives and works in Shanghai. His work has been exhibited in Asia and Europe. His exhibition at Fabien Fryns Fine Art will be his debut in North America.

Lu Xinjian’s paintings from his new series of City DNA III will be on view from June 25 through August 27. A vernissage will be held on Saturday, June 25, from 3 to 6 p.m. Catalogue is available.

F2 and Fabien Fryns Fine Art's booth at Art HK 2011

We are pleased to present our exhibition at the most anticipated art fair in Hong Kong.