绿茶拿铁 Green Tea Latte

[NYTimes] China’s Female Artists Quietly Emerge

zhangxiaomin — Wed, 06 August 2008 11:42:32 -0400

July 30, 2008 [link]

BEIJING — On a February day in 1989, a young woman walked into a show at the National Gallery of Art here, whipped out a pellet gun and fired two shots into a mirrored sculpture in an exhibition called “China/Avant-Garde.” Police officers swarmed into the museum. The show, the country’s first government-sponsored exhibition of experimental art, was shut down for days.

The woman, Xiao Lu, is an artist. The sculpture she fired on was her own, or rather a collaborative piece she had made with another artist, Tang Song, her boyfriend at the time. Why she did what she did was not immediately clear, but this didn’t matter.

She had set off a symbolic explosion.

The international press saw a rebellion story. China’s political and cultural vanguard claimed a hero. The government reacted as if attacked. The renowned art critic Li Xianting has described the incident as a precursor to the Tiananmen Square crackdown four months later. Whatever the truth, Ms. Xiao made the history books. She was a star.

She is the first and last Chinese female artist so far to achieve that status. Contemporary art in China is a man’s world. While the art market, all but nonexistent in 1989, has become a powerhouse industry and produced a pantheon of multimillionaire artist-celebrities, there are no women in that pantheon.

The new museums created to display contemporary art rarely give women solo shows. Among the hundreds of commercial galleries competing for attention in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere, art by women is hard to find.

Yet the art is there, and it is some of the most innovative work around, even as visibility remains a problem. On a monthlong stay, I visited several women who live and work in and around Beijing and have important careers, although none of them top the auction charts, and few are represented by prestigious galleries. An alternative list of women doing strong but little-noticed work would be long.

If any woman qualifies as a power artist on the current male model, Lin Tianmiao probably comes closest. She was born in 1961, and like many artists of her generation who were raised during the Cultural Revolution but came of age professionally in its rocky aftermath, she had a difficult start.

In the mid-1990s, with money scarce, censors watchful and no gallery or market structure in place, she and her husband, the conceptual artist Wang Gongxin, lived and worked in cramped Beijing apartments where they mounted one-night shows that doubled as rent parties.

Ms. Lin’s work reflected these hand-to-mouth conditions. It was made from used household utensils — teapots, woks, scissors, vegetable choppers — that she laboriously wrapped in layers of cheap white cotton thread to create inventories of domestic life that looked both threatening and precious.

With the market boom, her career took off, and her work grew in scale and formal polish. Her floor-to-ceiling installations of self-portrait photographs anchored by braids of white yarn are fixtures in international shows. She and Mr. Wang live in one of Beijing’s many gated high-rises designed for urban professionals; their joint studio is an antiques-filled farmhouse on the outskirts of the city, where, with a small staff of seamstresses, Ms. Lin produces ghostly — and expensive-looking — soft sculptures swelling with egg- and breast-shaped forms in pristine white silk.

Critics have noted affinities in her art to the “women’s work” aesthetic of certain Western feminists. Ms. Lin, who lived in New York City during the late 1980s, would not disagree. And she acknowledges that women are treated like second-class citizens in China — like “inactive thinkers,” as she puts it. Yet she is cautious about applying the term feminist to herself or her work. Why? The concept is too Western. It is too vague. China is not ready for feminism. China has its own brand of feminism. You hear variations on these reasons often, just as you do in the West.

Making the Past Portable

Yin Xuizhen is Ms. Lin’s near-contemporary. Both are of the “apartment art” generation and worked with homely, personal materials. For a 1995 installation, Ms. Yin unraveled the woolen yarn from secondhand men’s and women’s sweaters and used it to knit new sweaters that merged the genders. She sealed her own clothes, including items dating to childhood, in a suitcase, as if to preserve the past and make it portable. She also began gathering architectural scraps from the streets of her native Beijing, as if to document and memorialize a city being destroyed around her.

The threat of destruction pervades her recent large-scale work too, though now the implications are global. For a continuing piece called “Fashion Terrorism,” she created a miniature airport baggage claim with mysterious parcels stalled on a carousel. They may hold the possessions of immigrants in transit; they may hold weapons. We cannot know.

She, like Ms. Lin, is married to an artist, Song Dong, a video maker and conceptualist with a strong international reputation. In fact, a fair number of successful female artists in China are halves of art-world couples.

No artist in China has a more powerful spouse than Lu Qing does. She is married to the artist-architect Ai Weiwei, who was a consultant on the design for the 2008 Olympic Stadium, known as the Bird’s Nest. Yet it’s hard to think of an artist whose work is more different from his.

Mr. Ai is a conceptualist who specializes in controversy and confrontation. For one piece he smashed ancient Chinese pots. For another he disassembled antique furniture to make it unusable. On the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, he photographed a young woman standing in front of Mao’s portrait in the square and provocatively flipping up her skirt.

Ms. Lu was the woman in that picture. But her art is the opposite of exhibitionistic. Since 2000 she has made a single new work annually. At the beginning of each year she buys a bolt of fine silk 82 feet long. Over the next 12 months, using a brush and acrylic paint, she marks its surface with tight grid patterns. The results look like a cross between Agnes Martin’s grid drawings and traditional Chinese scroll painting, historically a man’s medium.

Some years she fills the cloth. Other years, when she can bring herself to work only sporadically, she leaves it half empty. At least one year, she painted nothing. But completion in any ordinary sense is not the goal. Whatever state the roll is in at year’s end, that is its finished state. She packs it away and buys a new bolt.

This is private, at-home work. “I don’t think what I’m doing is art,” Ms. Lu said. “In fact, it makes me forget what art is about.” Like Ms. Lin’s early wrappings and Ms. Yin’s knitting, this is art as performance and meditation.

Few if any of China’s lionized male artists are doing work as slow, private and hermetic. And by no means all women are.

In the 1990s the photographer Xing Danwen, born in 1967, documented the rough-and-tumble life of artists in the fringe squatter settlement here called the East Village. Her 1995 photographic series “Born With the Cultural Revolution” examined the status of her generation of women: heirs of a Maoist principle of gender equality now living in a market economy that undermines that equality. And the work did so with a complexity that makes Mr. Ai’s Tiananmen picture look like a one-liner.

Beyond Women’s Issues

What has been gained and lost in the transition between old and new ways of social thinking, between collectivism and individualism, is the subject of her recent “Urban Fiction” series. Here Ms. Xing digitally inserts miniature vignettes of domestic violence and isolation into photographs she has taken of tabletop models of Beijing high-rises. The original architectural models were made by real estate developers to sell new apartments like the spacious but unpalatial one that Ms. Xing lives in. Many of the tiny figures in her narratives have her face.

Clearly art by women in China is not confined to “women’s issues,” like family and home. Much of the art is about excavating a personal past and bringing it into the present, and about examining that present and how women are living it.

In 2000 Cui Xiuwen used a hidden camera to film a group of women, most of them prostitutes, talking, applying makeup, calling clients and counting cash in the bathroom of a Beijing karaoke bar. The video, titled “Lady’s Room,” was censored when it appeared in the 2002 Guangzhou Triennial, presumably because it presents realities — women as active agents in consumer eroticism — that contradict a spectrum of cultural ideals about gender, from a view of the sexes existing in harmonious balance to one of women as subservient. As the artist herself says of the video, “You can feel that it is a situation before a battle.”

More recently, Ms. Cui, who is in her late 30s, has produced highly finished photographs and paintings of adolescent girls dressed in uniforms of the Young Pioneers, a youth organization in China. Sometimes bruised and bloodied, the girls pose in what looks like the Forbidden City. And most recently, she has made pictures of older girls floating like somnambulant angels above Beijing rooftops. The theme of childhood and maternity recur almost obsessively, as they do in Ms. Lin’s new sculpture.

Xiong Wenyun, born in 1953, is on a different track. She has a cramped studio in the 798 District, a once-hot art neighborhood now overrun by second-tier galleries and tourists, but her best-known work, the 1998 photographic series “Moving Rainbow,” was shot far from Beijing and its art world.

For this project she traveled a bleak logging road that runs through westernmost China into Tibet. She photographed people she encountered, many of them residents of remote mountain villages, and talked to them about commercial development that threatened their way of life. She also took photographs of truck caravans and of shacklike truck stops that lined the route, after adorning both with fabric hangings keyed to the colors of Tibetan prayer flags.

A Different Role Model

Since Ms. Xiong finished her project, China has improved the trucking road and added a mountain tunnel to make Tibet more accessible to Chinese settlers and tourists. It has also prohibited logging in the region. As a result, the caravans and many of the truck stops that Ms. Xiong turned into temporary art installations are gone; her documents are what remains of them.

Ms. Xiong is well aware that “Moving Rainbow,” with its blend of activism, anthropology and abstraction, is an anomaly in new Chinese art, much of which, in addition to being only obliquely political, is product-oriented and studio-bound.

Not all of it is, though. A much-noticed young artist, Li Shurui, born in 1981, began her career while still an undergraduate with an ambitious outdoor installation. It consisted of a long line of fabric cubes that stretched across a lake in a remote part of Yunnan Province inhabited by a matriarchal ethnic minority.

Although she has since become best known for her paintings — air-brushed, semi-abstract images of music club interiors executed in a pleasing internationalist mode — she stood out in a recent gallery group show for an installation work that suggested a cross between a Minimalist environment illuminated by fluorescent lights and an open elevator stuck between floors. Some people spoke of savvy references to certain Western art; others noted a vague resemblance to the shot-up sculpture that caused so much fuss in 1989.

A few years ago Ms. Xiao revealed that the primary motivation behind the shooting had not been aesthetic or political, after all, but emotional. She was expressing anguish over her relationship with Mr. Tang, which was going sour. What she was firing at was not the sculpture per se, which was made from two telephone booths and titled “Dialogue,” but at her own image in its reflective surface.

For some people the significance of her action was diminished with that revelation, although to anyone viewing it through a Western feminist eye — meaning with the understanding that the personal is political — its significance increased.

As for feminism, Ms. Li, who is married to the painter Chen Jie, acknowledges the force of male chauvinism in the art world, both in China and elsewhere. But, she says, she is still too young, still too much in the stage of discovering herself, to figure out whether she considers herself a feminist or not.

It may say something about her present and future thinking, though, that when asked to name a cultural role model, she pointed neither to other artists nor to contemporary politics, but to the deep past: to the seventh-century ruler Wu Zetian, who through a combination of brains, beauty, unsparing ambition and tenacious hard work, became China’s first and only empress.

Interview with Chinese Art Collector Guan Yi

zhangxiaomin — Tue, 22 July 2008 15:49:06 -0400

From: The Art Newspaper; via: Danwei.org

"He says he is increasingly frustrated by the rampant speculation in the Chinese art market which is making it difficult for talented young artists to emerge today. He also sees the lack of professional art critics in China as another big problem. The tendency in China to equate high prices with art historical importance is hampering the development of significant work, he says."

"But to understand Chinese contemporary art, you must understand that its history is very short, it is hard for us to know what is good and what is bad. And with the [prices achieved at] auctions recently, this makes it even more difficult, as people use this as a way of judging art. So now it is very hard to write about Chinese art. There is no education, there is no tradition, no texts. How do you get an accurate answer to any question? Who can tell you? Chinese critics? There are far too many problems with them. Too many people have become business-oriented, so you have no idea if they are telling the truth or lying. In the west, critics are clearer on the work, so the price and critical meaning are quite separate, but in China critics aren’t clear. Can we trust the national art museums? The art museums are also not clear, the market has such an influence. So, I rely on myself."

TAN: So which contemporary artists do you think are important?

GY: The most recent period: Wang Xingwei, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Zheng Guogu, Zhou Tiehai, Yan Lei, Liu Weihua, Cao Fei, Qiu Anxiong—they all represent this time.

Complete Article Here.

【转载】Modern Chinese art conquers the West

zhangxiaomin — Tue, 01 July 2008 17:08:10 -0400

International Herald Tribune

By Nazanin Lankarani

Friday, June 27, 2008

BASEL, Switzerland: First, Western art galleries turned east, moving into China to cash in on its booming contemporary art scene. Now, Chinese galleries are trekking west.

Seven Chinese galleries participated in the main fair of Art Basel and in its satellite events this year, showing some of the most spectacular works in Art Unlimited, the exhibition platform for large-scale projects, video installations and live performances aimed at the institutional art market.

The Boers-Li Gallery in Beijing, a first-timer at the fair, showed Qiu Anxiong's "Staring Into Amnesia" (2007), an authentic 1960s Chinese train car inside which black-and-white war footage was projected onto the windows.

"My work is not about ideology. It is about reviving the memory of China," Qiu said.

There were also works by a three-man collective, Yangjiang Group, presented by Vitamin Creative Space of Guangzhou, China, which were shown in both the Art Unlimited section and Art Statements, a section featuring emerging artists working with rising galleries.

In Art Unlimited, the group presented "Garden III (Pine Trees)," (2008), a faux Chinese garden installation with trees, a path onto a bridge and a paper pond moving to music. At Art Statements, they showed scenes from daily life, including gamblers socializing around a dinner table.

Moving in the opposite direction, two big New York art galleries are about to open satellites in China.

China's economic boom has produced a growing class of wealthy private collectors whose interest in the local art market is reinforcing demand from Western collectors.

"Powerful buying from the West has been reinforced recently by intensive interest from new buyers from Mainland China, some 30 to 50 of them, as well as from Singapore and Taiwan," said Michael Goedhuis, a New York art dealer and a veteran of the Chinese art scene since 1993.

In July, the James Cohan Gallery, from the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, will be the first U.S. gallery to open in Shanghai, where its senior New York director, Arthur Solway, who is fluent in Mandarin, has already relocated.

"We want to address the second wave of collecting that will inevitably happen in China," James Cohan said from New York. "There is a certain maturity process in all collecting markets. Right now it is very focused on the domestic market, but we see mainlanders and Taiwanese focusing more on international collecting."

The PaceWildenstein Gallery, also in New York, will follow in August with a spectacular space in Dashanzi, the Beijing art district that has developed in and around Factory 798, a former munitions plant.

"China, Beijing specifically, is just emerging internationally as an art-making center," said Peter Boris, vice president of PaceWildenstein, who will be chairman of Pace Beijing.

"There are now only a few buyers in mainland China, but there will be more. Our target clientele are Asian collectors and the new wealth created there," Boris said in an interview at Art Basel.

The moves by PaceWildenstein and Cohan coincided with a new, more outward-looking wave of creativity sweeping over the Chinese contemporary art scene.

"We are starting to show the cosmopolitan, international attitude of the new generation of Chinese artists," said Primo Marella, owner of the Primo Marella Gallery in Milan who opened a gallery in Beijing in 2005. "There are only about a dozen."

"You cannot tell from their work that they are Chinese," he added. "They express strong ideas with a lot of freshness."

Marella showed new works by the painter and installation artist Chen Ke, the sculptor Liu Ding and the photographer Jiang Zhi at Scope Basel, a satellite fair of Art Basel.

"There is a huge explosion of creativity in China right now," said Goedhuis, the New York dealer. "Chinese artists, musicians, architects, film-makers, designers are creating a new language to express a totally new reality."

And the timing is not surprising. "It is happening that much more intensely in China because society has transformed in just 15 years."

This cultural revolution has flowered largely without Chinese institutional support. "There are virtually no contemporary art museums in China," Goedhuis said. "The government's claim to build 100 or 1,000 new museums has yet to become reality. There is very little state support of artists, if any."

In the absence of official support, private art centers like the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, funded by two Belgian collectors, Guy and Myriam Ullens, have opened to show private collections of Chinese art.

When not indifferent, official attitudes in China remain repressive, with government censors continuing to hunt down, albeit haphazardly, works deemed politically subversive, sexually explicit or culturally sensitive.

In 2006, the artists He An and Zhang Ding were imprisoned for taking part in a group show that included a work with peasants, colored gold but holding up blank placards, which was interpreted as a comment on the helplessness of the rural poor subjected to compulsory land seizures.

In February, a first exhibition of works by the Shanghai artist Zhang Huan was canceled at the Shanghai Art Museum. The authorities banned such works as giant sculptures of deformed bodies covered with cowhide, which they asserted were inappropriate Buddhist references.

Still, in the age of globalization, local censorship cannot stop work from being shown in the West.

Two of the "offensive" works by Zhang were reportedly bought by François Pinault, owner of Christie's. A third work, "Giant No. 3" (2008), a 15-foot-high, or 4.6-meter, installation made of cowhide, steel, wood and polystyrene foam, is on view at PaceWildenstein in New York through July 25.

"We are not overly concerned with censorship," said Boris of PaceWildenstein. "It creates a tension in China that is absent in New York or London. It allows for heroic art to be made."

Matching the official indifference or hostility to the artists has been the government's indifference to the free-wheeling art market, where speculation and an absence of oversight and regulation have given rise to talk of price fixing that would be deemed impermissible in the West.

In December, the French auction house Artcurial and the privately owned Chinese group Sun Media created the first Western auction house to pioneer into mainland China. On Jan. 20, Artcurial China held its first auction, with Francis Briest, one of Artcurial's principal Paris auctioneers, symbolically holding the hammer for the first lot.

The auction was a big success, the company said, bringing in $8.3 million for 72 lots, nearly double the high estimate, with only one lot unsold. Dominated by local traditional and figurative painting, the lots included a sculpture by a contemporary French artist, Richard Texier, entitled "Mimesis Deus."

With an estimate between 120,000 yuan and 160,000 yuan, or $17,350 and $23,130, the Texier sculpture soared to a hammer price of 3.36 million yuan, many times higher than any other work sold by the artist, according to data available on Artprice, a leading provider of art information on the Web.

According to Briest, the price reflected the unpredictability of auctions. "The art market is inherently irrational," he said. "If the hammer price was high, it is because at least two bidders were seduced by the piece and fought for it."

Other observers had a different explanation.

"It is common practice in China for auction houses to have some kind of arrangement in regard to the bidding process, because there are no laws against it in China," said Li Liang, director of the Eastlink Gallery in Shanghai.

Such arrangements can be used to create "buzz" around an artist's work, said a person with knowledge of the Chinese auction scene who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the subject.

"Auction houses in China enter into agreements with artists or consignors to sell works without an established market value," the person said. "The seller agrees to pay a 10 percent commission on the hammer price. In exchange, the house engages in 'fake' bidding to sell the piece. That helps create a baseline value for the piece.

"An inquiry into the auction house's account would show that the hammer price is not paid in, just the 10 percent commission."

Briest, responding to questions, dismissed Artcurial's responsibility in the Texier sale. "We are aware that transparency is a relative term in China, but we do not condone such practices," he said.

Artcurial was only a shareholder in Artcurial China, Briest added. Legal responsibility rested with Sun Media, the Chinese partner, "in whom we trust," he said. "They have certified the results of this auction."

Meanwhile, transparent or not, the China market increasingly is attracting not only Western galleries and auctioneers, but also organizers of art fairs.

Last month, the Paris fair ArtParis made its debut in Shenzhen, China. Meanwhile, the Shanghai ShContemporary fair is planning to hold its second edition in September, despite a heated dispute between one of its original organizers, Pierre Huber, a dealer in Geneva who was artistic director of the fair last year, and the Parisian dealer Enrico Navarra.

Navarra accused Huber of a conflict of interest between his position as director and his role as a dealer.

"In the West, you could not organize an international fair where the sole artistic director is an active dealer and uses his position within the fair to promote his own artists in competition with fair participants," Navarra said.

For this year's edition of ShContemporary, Huber - who was also under pressure after a French television program last year showed him apparently bullying Chinese artists into selling their work to him cheaply - has been replaced as artistic director of the fair by a 10-person committee.

In a telephone interview, Huber denied a conflict of interest and declined to discuss Navarra. "For me, ShContemporary was, first and foremost, a cultural project which was destroyed by the commercial interests of others," he said.

Amid the feeding frenzy of galleristas and auctioneers, the artists sometimes look like swimmers in a shark cage - wealthy swimmers, that is.

"Some of the artists, propelled by the attention and the intense demand, have become very rich by Chinese standards," Goedhuis said.

But, "there is no structure in China for artists to sell through dealers who set prices and a career path for the good artists to flourish," he added. "Artists are left floundering, trying to make a fast buck on the one hand, and do creative work on the other. Meantime, they are besieged by buyers, dealers and auction houses."

Goedhuis himself was at the center of a recent controversy when part of the Estella Collection of Chinese contemporary art, which he had amassed for a group of collectors, was auctioned at Sotheby's Hong Kong in April. Angered artists said they had been duped into selling, for low prices, pieces that fetched millions at the auction. Goedhuis has denied knowledge of the collectors' intent to sell.

Meanwhile, auction prices continue to soar, despite some fears that they may be due for a correction.

At the Christie's Hong Kong evening sale of Asian contemporary art on May 24, a new record was achieved for Yue Minjun, whose 1993 work "Gweong-Gweong" sold for 54 million Hong Kong dollars, or $7 million, more than 10 times the price it fetched when it went under the hammer in 2005.

"By just looking at auction prices, people assume that the Chinese market is a bubble, that there is no historical or intellectual grounding to the art, no gravity to the market," said Boris of PaceWildenstein. "In reality, we are witnessing the birth of an emerging identity."

PaceWildenstein's move into Beijing reflects its commitment to a long term view, he said. "We are doing a job for Zhang Huan and other Chinese artists, to bring them into Western collections and museums. We are working to integrate them into world art history where they belong."

Goedhuis, too, says the Chinese market is no bubble, although his reasoning is more prosaic.

"There are over a billion people in China," he said. "If only a few more people enter the art market, prices will go even higher. There is enough wealth in China to make Chinese art extremely expensive.

"China is the dominant reality for the rest of history. There is nothing stopping China."

【转载】前卫中国：在泡沫中狂欢

zhangxiaomin — Tue, 01 July 2008 17:00:32 -0400

刘柠

2007 年，随着奥运会的临近，中国经济开始冲刺：据中国国家统计局公开的数据，去年全国GDP增长11.4%，CPI（价格指数）增长4.8%；在北京、上海等一级城市，一年内房地产价格至少上涨一倍，涨幅超过过去6年的总和；资本市场更是一片尖叫，5年未遇的牛市令人血脉贲张。

行情最看好的，既不是房地产，也不是资本市场，而是艺术品市场。这个市场的发力，非自去年始。但从2000年至今，海外对中国艺术品市场价值的整体评估，已上升百倍以上。曾几何时动辄被警察取缔，长期以来在社会边缘辗转流浪的前卫艺术家，在前卫艺术的“政治正确”性确立之后，摇身一变，成为时尚的新宠，随便翻开一本刊物，艺术家的名字与娱乐明星、著名电影导演和开发首都CBD商圈的大地产商等“成功人士”一起，装点着时尚杂志的封面。在北京的798和上海可以俯瞰“新天地”的顶级商业画廊中，每个晚上都上演鸡尾酒派对，脱下工装服的艺术家西装革履；继法国尤伦斯（UCCA，Ullens Center For Contemporary Art）抢滩798之后，纽约的古根海姆艺术博物馆（Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum）和巴黎的蓬皮杜中心（Pompidou Center）正考虑在北京建立分部。

“十年修得同船度，百年修得共枕眠。”艺术与资本如此“和谐”的结局到底是不是艺术家所期待的？答案是肯定的，这是自从前卫艺术运动在本土出现（指当代，远的不算）至今，3代艺术家中前两代修来的善果。正如在798修葺一新的“尤伦斯当代艺术中心”刚刚落幕的“85新潮回顾展”主展厅的墙上所写的主题词所说的：“我认为中国艺术家除了没有钱，没有大工作室，什么都有，而且什么都是最好的。”纵然经历过饥饿、贫困，治安联防和警察的追剿，国家体制与资本的放逐及艺术家的自我放逐，我们念兹在兹的前卫艺术家们矢志不渝，不懈打拼，终于以自身的努力和偏执，创造了“前卫中国”（Avant China）的艺术品牌，迎来了全球化时代“创意中国”（Creative China）的艺术新浪潮，从而向世界证明，中国艺术家“什么都是最好的”。因为“什么都是最好的”，“大工作室”自不在话下，大House、“大奔”、“大蜜”也应运而来，成为今天牛逼艺术家“成功”的标识。

继去年3月，张晓刚的油画《血缘系列：三位同志》在纽约苏富比拍卖会上，拍出211万美元的高价之后，中国前卫艺术品的价格一路飙升：11月，在北京保利秋季拍卖会上，刘小东的油画《三峡新移民》以2200万元的价格被一位本土企业家收藏；同月的香港嘉士德（CHRISTIE’S）艺术品拍卖会上，旅美中国艺术家蔡国强的《APEC景观焰火表演14幅草图》以7424万港元的天价，创中国当代艺术品拍卖的世界纪录。进而，在位于四川成都郊外的著名风景胜地青城山麓，由地方政府主导并划拨土地，由开发商投资，日本一流设计师设计，专为张晓刚、王广义、方力钧、岳敏君等8位国内顶尖艺术家兴建，最终产权归艺术家个人所有的私人美术馆群（青城山"中国当代美术馆群，由8座私人美术馆和1座中心美术馆构成，共占地110亩）建设项目启动，将在今年内竣工并投入使用。如此大手笔的艺术开发，不仅国内是破天荒，世界上都鲜有先例。一个不言而喻的事实是，资本，不仅作为酵母，使艺术品市场发生“化学反应”，而且早已成为决定性的主导力量：不仅决定艺术品的价格，而且决定艺术家的归属，甚至前卫艺术的发展方向。乃至美国《纽约时报》发表评论指出：中国前卫艺术是一场 “新革命”，其本质在于“艺术向资本主义致意”。

其实，岂止是“向资本主义致意”，短短几年时间，中国本土的艺术商业机制迅速成熟，其商业化程度甚至已然超过被称为“资本主义”的美、欧、日等国，堪称“优等生”。4年前，北京的艺术区还只有798 一处，现在有不下十处（草场地、索家庄、环铁、宋庄等），并蔓延至全国7个城市；5年前，商业画廊不足30家，现在有数百家（仅798内就有206家）； 5年前，国内拍卖当代艺术品的拍卖行不超过5家，现在超过50家。今天，哪个资深艺术家不是“前店后厂”式经营，哪个展览会不是展销会？批评家做策展人，策展人当经纪人，甚至索性开画廊——批评家、策展人、经纪人一体化，中国之大，几乎已没有免费撰写艺术评论的批评家和免费发表评论文章的艺术类刊物。在中国市场的强烈诱惑下，苏富比和嘉士德这两个艺术拍卖的百年老店，甚至打破成规，越过画廊等中间环节，向艺术家直接索画；至于相反的情形——艺术家送货上门（送自己的作品给拍卖行），早已不是新闻。某种普遍的价格焦虑，竟然让践行百年、代代相传的游戏规则遁于无形，令人哭笑不得。

在这种过热的商业机制催生下，一代，不，几代艺术家迅速致富。百万、千万富翁已碰鼻子碰眼，即使是亿万富翁，恐怕也不可以屈指计。已“崛起”的艺术家，为谋求更大的成功，不惜把艺术创作的个性劳动生产线化、工业化，以雇工（助手和“枪手”），甚至公司化的运作，来满足市场的需求，被有些评论家奚落为“艺术资本家”。

为应对“画廊比画家多”的僧多粥少局面，一场空前惨烈的人才争夺战已经白热化。张晓刚从出道到成名用了近20年时间，新锐艺术家只需几年，甚至连专业艺术教育的四年寒窗都无需熬完即可成“腕”——可谓“内无怨女，外无旷夫”，统统被艺术商业体制一网打尽。一些美院油画系、雕塑系毕业班的学生，先于学位证书，拿到的是画廊的合约，人尚未出大学校园，便开始以6位数的价格出售作品。在慨叹“江山代有人才出”、“青出于蓝胜于蓝”之余，也不禁为新生代的小艺术家们捏把汗：毕竟嫩了点，除非艺术从此不复是表现人生和痛苦的“恶之华”。

不过，多思也无益，当下艺术反正离痛苦是越来越远了，日益成了某种近乎中性的“纯粹”艺术。自从发明了“玩世现实主义”（Cynical Realism）和“中国艳俗”（China
Kitsch）之后，任何痛苦、不公正、恶趣味都可以用这俩“万能”概念来套，套上之后，原先的感受便消解于无形——这是为什么本土前卫艺术中何以有那么多玩世、艳俗形象的答案，也是为什么转型期的中国何以越来越像一个艳俗的大卖场的答案。

如果说，八、九十年代的艺术家是“痛并快乐着”的话，那么今天的艺术家则是“乐并麻木着”，像极了方力钧笔下的秃头泼皮和岳敏君作品中咧开露出32颗雪白牙齿的大嘴烂笑的哥们。一个不争而可悲的事实是，繁荣的泡沫一日不破灭，中国前卫艺术便会在泡沫中狂欢不已，并在狂欢中坠落。

和玛丽·弗吉尼亚·斯万森一起推广你的摄影

zhangxiaomin — Wed, 11 June 2008 16:26:35 -0400

这个博客教给在美国的摄影师一些关于市场、成名的信息和机会，看起来不错。链接

其中有一个6月13日的免费讲座。

有些旧了的新闻：New director for the Ullens Center

zhangxiaomin — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:01:19 -0400

Source: The Art Newspaper

French curator Jérôme Sans is expected to be announced as the new artistic director of the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing at a press conference in Paris on Tuesday. Speaking to The Art Newspaper last month, Guy Ullens, the Belgian foodstuffs baron who has entirely funded UCCA, said that Jérôme Sans had been selected as the new director and that an announcement would be made as soon as the appropriate Chinese authorities had approved the appointment.

If all goes according to plan, Mr Sans will replace UCCA’s current artistic director, Fei Dawei, the Chinese art critic, who is to step down from operational matters and take on a research-based role. Dawei curated the museum’s inaugural show “‘85 New Wave: the Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art” which received mostly positive reviews in the international press but divided opinion in Beijing.

The UCCA press office downplayed the staffing changes, saying that Dawei’s original remit was only ever to be “instrumental in setting up the centre as a museum.”

However when Dawei was presented to the press at the opening of the museum last November he was described as UCCA’s full-time, long-term artistic director. Mr Dawei could not be reached for comment, however, sources in Beijing say that Mr Dawei’s disagreements with his colleagues are believed to be behind his change in role.

Jérôme Sans is a distinguished figure in the contemporary art world but his appointment will leave UCCA open to criticism that there are no senior Chinese members of staff at the institution (deputy director Colin Chinnery is half British).

Born in 1960, Mr Sans has worked for the Milwaukee Institute of Visual Arts and helped establish the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2002. Most recently, he served as Programme Director at the Baltic arts centre in Gateshead, England, but stepped down last July after just 14 months in the role.

Dorothea Lange (Mark Durden, Phaidon)

zhangxiaomin — Mon, 28 April 2008 15:14:22 -0400

Lange's photography reveals a particular sensitivity to the body's gestures and postures. Sally Stein has suggested that the photographer 'viewed the trials of the Great Depression as something registered and grappled with first and foremost in the body'. It is tempting to see this sensitivity to the body as linked to the legacy of her illness--a bout of polio in her childhood had left her with a pronounced limp. In the early 1960s she described the impact of her handicap:' it formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me.' In later life, Lange was debilitated by serious and extended bouts of ulcers and oesophagitis, her illness interrupting and preventing many of her planned projects.

Life (Roy) Stryker, Lange believed that photography was a tool of political action. It could and did effect change. As soon as she had printed the negatives, she went to tell the City Editor of the San Francisco News of the migrants' plight. He notified United Press and on 10 March the News ran a report that the federal government was rushing in 20,000 pounds of food to feed the hungry migrants at the camp. Alongside the headline ran two of Lange's pictures, but not the now famous photograph.

In her account of picturing the migrant mother, Lange refers to taking five photographs, 'working closer and closer from the same director'. In fact, she took six pictures, submitting five to Stryker and withholding one, probably for aesthetic reasons. James C. Curtis suggests that it was a trial shot, made soon after she got her equipment out of her car, a means of easing her subjects into posing for their portrait session. Considering these images in terms of a series culminating in the well-known portrtait of the migrant mother, one gets the sense both of a careful arrangement of the mother and her children and the progressive editing out of distracting and seemingly irrelevant details. The particularities of context are erased to achieve a more abstract and thereby universal representation of poverty.

The social unrest and unemployment of the Depression ended with America's preparation for war. On 19 February 1942 President Roosevelt signed the now infamous Executive Order 9066, which allowed military commanders to set up military zones wherever they thought necessary and gave them the power to remove anyone they wanted from these areas. A few weeks later, there was an order that all persons of Japanese descent must leave the Pacific Coast military areas: 110,000 men, women and children were told to report the evacuation in Northern California. She strongly opposed the removal of these people from their homes. According to critic A. D. Coleman, the photographs she made of the evacuation were some of her 'most poignant and angry pictures'. He compared them to her images of the Depression, revealing 'her concern with the survival of human dignity under impossible circumstances'. Showing the quiet patience of these families in such dehumanizing conditions, the photographers function as a powerful exposure of American racism and wartime hysteria.

城市节奏/人的节奏 Urban Rhythms/Human Rhythms

zhangxiaomin — Thu, 17 April 2008 17:17:22 -0400

Published in Dec 2005

偶然拾起一年半前北影摄影学院院长随手送给我的他们出的一本影集“城市节奏/人的节奏”，记得当时翻了翻没觉得出奇，现在看看竟然看到了多处闪光点，也不知是我的审美提高了还是后退了，当然我向来对城市和人的题材特别敏感是一贯的。该画册作品由中法9名在校（师？）学生创作，其中包括了“鼎鼎大名”的busoni (而且是排在了头阵）。巴黎第八大学摄影系美学教授Jean-Claude Moineau写的序言，先搬一搬。(翻译：Simon Welsh，王晶，刘芳，唐圆媛，吴沁沁）

。。。节奏不仅拥有组织形成稳定与静止的能力，而且也有形成运动和变迁的权威。它是形成过程中的形态，而非已经完成的形态。但是它确实表现出一种独有的特征，使它更加背逆而非符合一般的变革，因此，很矛盾的是，它虽然受一定的规律引导，但却更多的表现出来杂乱而非有序。所有这些都表明，节奏并不一定要与质疑这一断言不一致，从而才各种媒体的许多艺术实践似乎都着迷与杂乱本身，而不寻求建立任何一种秩序时，通过拒绝所有“形式”的构图，拒绝重点的选取，在“原始的混沌”（或者是古老的“创造性火花”）中寻找秩序和有形。

...Rhythm has the power to organise not only stability and stasis but also movement and flux). Form in the process of forming rather than fully formed and finished form. But it does show a neguentropic character, therefore it is more contrary to than conforming to the general evolution, directed as it is by laws which, in a pardoxical way, tend to dictate disorder rather than order. All this suggests that it would not necessarily be incongruous to question this determination to summon up order and form from "primordial chaos" (or else the old "creative spark") at a time when many artistic practices, in all types of media, seem to be more fascinated by chaos as such, without seeking to impose any sort of order on it, by rejecting all "forms" of composition, a priori or a posteriori.

米歇尔·福柯更是如此认为，节奏在保证身体的顺从和个体的征服时，是一个主要的纪律手段（即使对那些服从现有权力结构和允许自己被主体重建的人具有双重意义）。机制又一次开始在各种各样领域里发生作用：修道院、兵营、学校、健身房、监狱、诊所、工厂、车间等等，日程表也逐渐进入工作进度和学校校历。这对规划设计视听产业是有帮助的，因为它们可以为所谓的自由时间建立一种节奏，尽管这种自由只是名义上的，其本身就出于工作和休闲之间井然有序的节奏中。而正是城市化本身才要求我们不仅要对自我空间进行防卫（这些空间不仅仅属于城市），也要对自我时间进行防卫，要求我们掌握网络波动起伏。

All the more so as, according to Michel Foucault, the rhythmic has been one of the main disciplinary operators in assuring the docility of bodies and the subjugation of individuals (even though it is in a double sense concerning those who subordinate individuals to the existing power structure and those who allow themselves to be constructed effectively as subjects). Mechanisms acting, once again, in the most varied fields of activity: monastery, barracks, school, gymnasium, prison, clinic, workshop, factory, etc. Timetables, marching in step, working pace, school calendars, etc. To which it would be helpful to add the programming of the audiovisual industry which gives a rhythm to so-called free time which is only free in name and itself proceeds from the well-regulated rhythmic alternating between working time and leisure time. And it is urbanisation itself that requires the squaring-off not only of space (all space and not only that of the city) but equally of time. Mastering the fluctuations circulating in the networks.

因此，节奏已经被降为一种调子，一种量尺，因为莽撞无礼而收敛、而精疲力尽。所有这些都在节奏--尤其是艺术中的节奏--及时到来以躲避那些掌控生理与社会韵律，节拍时间与其它预先设定好的节奏时出现。节奏既不受可观察性实验规则的决定，也不受法定规则的影响。节奏很容易在音乐或在爱情里，通过紧张-放松、收缩-舒展的独特循环，变为不规则也不受限制的东西。就像基尔斯·蒂鲁思和费利柯斯·瓜德瑞曾经指出的那样，节奏本身是不可估量的。“真正有节奏的是差异，重复不能产生节奏。不过，这种生产性重复与复制手段毫无联系。”

Thus has rhythm been reduced to cadence, metre, and keeping time, and so quietened down and emptied of its impertinence. And all this when rhythm-particularly in art-is "in time" to escape cadences which supervise biological and social cadences, metronomic time and other pre-programmed rhythms. Rhythm is neither determined by empirically observable regularities nor subject to any prescriptive rules. Rhythm can easily be irregular, not being limited, in music as in love, by the unique cycle of tension-relaxation, systole-diastole. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have pointed out, rhythm is immeasurable as such. "It is difference which is rhythmic, and not repetition which produces it, however; but, all at once, this productive repetition had nothing to do with a reproductive measure".

与时间作为一种给定的目标，或作为感性的优先（就像康德看到的那样）不同的是，节奏是产生有生命的、而非精密计算的时间的。节奏使我们每个人的生命得以搏动。节奏是脉动，是韵律分析，是生命的拍节和振颤。

Rather than time being an objective given, or else, an a priori form of sensibility (as Kant saw it), rhythm is what generate lived, non chronometric time. Rhythm is what pulsates life in each one of us. Rhythm is pulsation, scansion, beating and trembling.

恍惚中的节奏是脱离于任何一种征服之外的，它超越了本身，是主体从他的生存环境中暂时超越自己，解放自己的方式。节奏不是静止的，是由喜悦和暂时的着迷传递的。

Rhythm, in trance phenomena, is disengaged from all subjugation, exceeding itself, and is the means by which the subject exceeds himself, liberating himself-for a time-from his environment and from himself. Not static, but transported by delight and temporal ecstasy.

Whitney Biennial 2008 at Park Avenue Armory

zhangxiaomin — Thu, 13 March 2008 13:15:50 -0400

惠特尼双年展的装置和表演部分今年设置在了公园大道上的Seventh Regiment Armory，是由Art Production Fund承办的（这个非营利的艺术“承包公司”很有些讲头，待我研究研究再表）。本来昨晚有burlesque表演，怎奈我们老师认为不是艺术，不让我们看，只有我一个贼忒兮兮地一个劲儿的用眼角溜儿，可惜了她雪白的胸脯和大腿。结果老师让我们写展览评论，这下我傻眼了，我好像是唯一一个没基础的学生吧。。。评论这玩意儿现在我也不敢乱发，一来水平太凹，二来号称现在媒体中已经没有负面评论了。我还没出道就大嘴巴把人都得罪了，将来还怎么混呐？闷～

曹斐的RMB City

zhangxiaomin — Tue, 11 March 2008 12:22:41 -0400

如果有机会采访曹斐，我想问她，为什么在“第二次生命”(Second Life)中她的avatar叫China Tracy? 因为我觉得她的名字本身反映了她接触这个项目的切入点：她觉得自己的实验经历代表了中国人？还是中国人在非中国的环境中的首要自我认同是“中国人”（而这个共性大于职业、爱好、理想角色。。。）？这个问题本身是个很有趣的表演艺术的题目。Second Life是可以完全匿名在世界任何角落参加的在线游戏，很难想象一个法国人会自称“French Jean"或是英国人自称"English John"。我猜曹斐是很有意识的以一个中国艺术家的身份去参与这个游戏，也许和中国的玩家尚不多有关，也许和她想要表达的想法有关--这从她跟着的RMB City项目可以看得更清楚。她在一个采访中说，建立这个想象中的城市的初衷是因为Second Life里没有中国人熟悉的场所。从短片中可以看到设计的想法一半是好玩，一半又使用了很多符号（符号是不可避免的），好比标语口号、天安门、三峡、烟囱、污染以及伟人雕像等等。其实我觉得她的构想过程如果真正代表了average Chinese会很有意思--可以窥见普通中国人是怎样认定自己以及和周围的环境及社会的的关系的。如果曹斐开放玩家限定，可以让更多人投票决定如何建设城市，会更有意思。不过，我觉得当玩家被界定为“中国代表”后，他/她的思路会受到很大局限，似乎违背了项目的本意。而且，我对游戏也不懂，不知道有没有可操作性。。。</p><p>Second Life本身是个极好的社会学研究项目，我读到过很多关于游戏内人物行为的有意思的观察。去年瑞典政府率先在Second Life里建立起了瑞典王国驻第二生命大使馆，真绝了！我对瑞典政府的先知先觉佩服的五体投地。

其它China Tracy的短片可以在这里看到。