Moves on to Contemporary Arab and Iranian Art

You might think Chinese Contemporary art is over and washed up, yesterday’s fad. But someone forgot to tell the British public. Charles Saatchi’s inaugural exhibition, Revolution Continues, is a huge hit in London:

About 5,200 visitors each day have seen the free Revolution Continues exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, which means that by the time the show closes it will have attracted about 525,000 people. Only 300,000 visited Charles Saatchi’s 1997 Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy.

How, you ask, will the impresario top that? By moving on to the latest field of art that is experiencing rapid growth: Contemporary Indian? SouthEast Asian? Nope and nope again.

Although art from the region is often overlooked because of the tense political situation, the former advertising mogul, who was born in Baghdad, said: “The work is breathtaking - new Arabian artists are about to take centre stage in the art world.” The stars of the new show - called Unveiled - include the brothers Rokni and Ramin Haerizadeh, from Tehran, Khaled Hafez from Cairo and Wafa Hourani from Hebron in Palestine.

Chinese Art Show Draws Record Crowd (This Is London)

Contemporary Chinese: No

In London there are somewhat dueling exhibitions of hot collecting categories, Contemporar Indian and Chinese art. The Evening Standard’s Ben Lewis takes the coincidence as an opportunity to validate Indian art:

The global contemporary art boom of the past decade has produced substantial contemporary art scenes in the swiftly growing economies of India and China, and you can see survey shows of both these worlds in London at the moment — one at the Serpentine and one at the Saatchi Gallery. But what a difference a bit of curating can make! Everything that Saatchi gets wrong in his Chinese show, the Serpentine gets right in its Indian one. While the Duke of York’s Barracks show is a chart of the cheesiest Chinese auction-house hits, the Serpentine is a treasure trove of subtlety and surprise. [ . . . ]

The Serpentine show takes a careful look at the Indian contemporary art scene, and instead of attempting an overarching survey, presents an essayistic tour of a handful of contrasting artists. [ . . . ]

Lewis falls hard for Subodh Gupta’s Indian courtroom re-assembled at the Serpentine gallery. He finds it a refreshing contrast to Gupta’s increasingly iconic stainless steek cookware paintings and sculpture:

I had become rather disillusioned by all the repetitive pots-and-pans pieces I’d see by Gupta over the past few years, and I loathe the terrible spin-off photorealist paintings of the same kitchenware which have been on show in every auction preview. The new work shows what resources this artist can tap as long as he doesn’t pander to the tastes of his dimwitted market of millionaire collectors.

New Stars in Indian Highway (This is London)

Time has a thoughtful and engaging story on New York’s Asia Society show on China’s propaganda art:

Though they were produced in murderous times, the works at the Asia Society are almost uniformly cheery, following the dictum of Jiang Qing, Mao’s fourth wife and ultimate cultural arbiter, that art be “red, bright and shining.” In other words: propaganda. Asia Society Museum Director Melissa Chiu and co-curator Zheng Shengtian argue in the show’s excellent catalog, however, that, didactic or not, socialist art represented a “significant cultural movement in China” — one that produced some “truly great art,” especially paintings, and that such works “continue to influence Chinese visual culture.” The contemporary installation artist Xu Bing, whose Cultural Revolution – era drawings are on display, supports the idea that the production of propaganda led to legitimate artistic achievement. “If you want to probe deeply into the underpinnings of contemporary Chinese art,” he says in the catalog, “you have to consider the influence of the Cultural Revolution on my generation because it was an entirely unique experience.” [ . . . ]

Some of those artists went on to great success later like Chen Yifei.

Unlike their contemporary counterparts, revolutionary artists painted without cynicism and with plenty of socialist ardor. That doesn’t mean that their work was immune from interference or mishandling. When Shen Jiawei’s Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland — a heroic masterpiece of three guards in a watchtower high above a snowy landscape — was first exhibited in Beijing in 1974, the faces of the soldiers had been made fuller, fiercer and pinker on Jiang Qing’s orders. In the present exhibition, the painting has been restored to the image intended by the artist, now a highly acclaimed portraitist in Australia.

Seeing Red (Time)

You have to enjoy the myopia of fashion writers. Here the Telegraph’s Richard Dorment was invited to Beijing to see Dior’s exhibition of 21 Chinese Contemporary artists who created work in response to 60 years of Dior. It’s hard to judge without actually seeing the work, but Dorment’s own description of the art suggests . . . shall we say a dialectic show. Nonetheless, the fashion writer finds a way to gush about the House of Dior and read the artist’s work as an unfailing homage to the genius of France:

On first seeing the masterpieces by Dior and Galliano on show, I was afraid the whole exhibition was going to be unfair to the Chinese artists, who wouldn’t stand a chance when placed beside these two designers of genius. But, amazingly, they not only held their own but, with only a few exceptions, responded to the challenge with works of art that more than measured up to the formidable visual competition. [ . . . ]

On one wall of a narrow corridor, Wang Gongxin shows films of catwalk models wearing some of Galliano’s most outlandish dresses, while on the opposite wall real women with real bodies strut and pose in the artist’s own uncannily accurate imitations of the same dresses, which he makes using cheap materials crudely pinned and taped together. Needless to say, the cascading fabrics that look so wonderful on young women with bodies like stick insects look ridiculous on older women of normal height and weight.

The artist isn’t only mocking the artificiality of haute couture, exactly, but giving us a fundamental insight into the work of a designer like Galliano, who uses fabric the way sculptors use clay and painters colour. His work is essentially abstract, an end in itself, art for art’s sake. [ . . . ]

Just as in the 18th and 19th centuries Chinese artists developed an export market for their porcelain by adapting their designs to accommodate Western taste, so modern Chinese artists respond to Western design not by challenging or dismissing it, but by making it their own.

Christian Dior and Chinese Artists: all dressed up for the installation of the year (Telegraph)

The International Herald Tribune sums up the state of the Chinese Contemporary art market:

“The market for Chinese contemporary art had long been overheated. Many artworks and artists are overpriced and overrated, notwithstanding the fact that they are good artworks by good artists. Needless to say, there is a lot of junk being traded as “meaningful’ artwork,” said Daniel Komala, the president of Larasati Auctioneers in Singapore.

“For good artworks, the bubble has deflated significantly; for meaningless artworks, the bubble simply burst,” Komala said. “The market is looking for a new equilibrium, which is somewhere between 30 to 40 percent below its peak.” [ . . . ]

Vinci Chang, head of 20th century Chinese and Asian contemporary art at Christie’s Hong Kong, also sees a bright side. “This is a buyer’s market,” she said. “If you have a keen eye and know what is best, this is probably the best time to get the best work at the best price.”

Komala said: “As long as the price of the top Chinese contemporary artists such as Zhang Xiaogang and others is still a fraction of Damien Hirst’s,” the buyers will return.

Chinese Contemporary Art Bubble Goes Flat (International Herald Tribune)

‘That’s too much work,’ the director says.

Watch this quick interview with Oliver Stone in Hong Kong before the sale of his five paintings of Contemporary Chinese art. In it, Stone mentions that there’s real demand from the Chinese for the paintings, so he’s passing them along (at a profit.) He also talks about his interest in painting and the importance of these paintings in China’s cultural history.

The interviewer is someone named Thomas Crampton who is lives in Hong Kong and has a blog here.

To Art + Auction, the Hong Kong sale of Contemporary Chinese art was a disappointment:

Zhang Xiaogang’s Bloodline: Big Family, No. 2, was the session’s most expensive lot; the 1995 oil on canvas went for HK$26,420,000 to an anonymous phone bidder. Still, it was a disappointing result. The work had been expected to sell for about HK$30 million and boasted considerable star power: The piece has been exhibited prominently by U.S. museums and was from the collection of Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone. The director, who has been quietly buying and selling for years, even made a rare personal appearance on the Christie’s floor the day before the auction to be seen with the five Chinese contemporary paintings he had put up for sale.

But Colin Gleadell tells another story in the Telegraph:

Hollywood film director Oliver Stone, who recently completed the George W Bush biopic W, sold three contemporary Chinese paintings at Christie’s in Hong Kong on Sunday for £2.9million. Stone will have realised a handsome profit as the paintings, including Liu Wei’s Revolutionary Family, a portrait of the artist with his father which sold below estimate for £243,000, were bought in the early 1990s when contemporary Chinese art was barely a glimmer in the market’s eye. The contemporary Asian art sale was otherwise a lacklustre event in which nearly half the lots went unsold.

Has the Asian Contemporary Bubble Burst? (ArtInfo)

Oliver Stone Nets a Profit from Chinese Art (Telegraph)

Reuters carries the results from Christie’s sales of Contemporary Chinese art and 20th Century Chinese art. The two sales brought in US$18.1 million with approximately half of the lots sold:

“The people who were willing to spend HK$5 million was fairly limited tonight,” said Roger McIlroy, an art dealer and former deputy Chairman of Christie’s in Asia.

“The prices they (the sellers) were seeking were probably more than they’d paid four years ago, with the market at the moment indicating a retraction back a few years in price levels.”

One bright spot was Zao Wou-Ki’s “Hommage a Tou-Fou,” a large abstract work of swirling greys and reds which fetched HK$45.5 million ($5.86 million) — an auction record for the artist.

The top lot in the Asian contemporary sale was Zhang Xiaogang’s “Bloodline: Big Family No. 2″ — a large family portrait from the collection of Hollywood director Oliver Stone which sold for HK$26.4 million ($3.4 million) — though well below its pre-sale estimate of around HK$40 million.

Curiously, the lead lot in the Southeast Asian sale that took place in the afternoon seems to have been withdrawn. But the sale, which was not covered by Reuters, pulled in almost $4 million with two-thirds of the lots sold. This picture, above, by Yasmin Sison, Bound, went for more than twice the high estimate at just under $18,000.

Bloomberg prognosticates on Christie’s Hong Kong week of sales beginning today:

Christie’s International’s Asia President Andy Foster says the company’s Hong Kong art auction that starts this weekend will feature “the finest selection in years” of antiques, paintings and gems. Top collectors like Robert Chang agree — but say they probably won’t buy.

“Market conditions are bad,” said Chang, the doyen of Hong Kong’s Chinese antiques, who set an auction record for a Qing Dynasty ceramic in 2006 with his sale of an imperial bowl for HK$151.3 million ($19.5 million). “These are quality lots, but whether they can sell in this climate is anyone’s guess.”

Christie’s, the biggest art auction house in Hong Kong, will offer 2,500 artworks, antiques and gems over five days that it expects to fetch HK$1.75 billion.

“I feel confident we have done our best to show what a fine collection we have; it’s now up to the market to respond,” said Foster in an interview. “We are in the middle of a downturn, so it’s hard to predict what the results would be.”

Foster said Christie’s has convinced some sellers to lower the reserve price on their lots to speed sale, though the only way for buyers to find these bargains is to turn up for the auctions. He aims for at least half the lots to find new owners.

The five-day sale begins on Saturday evening with an auction of Chateau Latour wines. Top lots feature at the contemporary-art evening sale on Nov. 30 and the antique auction on Dec. 3 [ . . . ]

Lu Feifei, a Shanghai-based art dealer who bought Emperor Qianlong’s jade-hilted saber-and-scabbard for HK$59 million and his parade armor for HK$14 million at Sotheby’s October auction, said he hasn’t got any orders from clients to buy at Christie’s auction and has no plans yet to make purchases of his own.

“Everyone is affected by the current mood in the market,” said Lu, 31. “It may be a tough auction; people are cutting out what they can do without.”

Christie’s Girds for ‘Tough’ Asia Sale as Rout Abides (Bloomberg)

ArtSingapore Goes On

Lost in the all the hullabaloo of the financial crisis and bailout, ArtSingapore opened on Oct. 10 and closes tomorrow (really almost today Singapore time.) Bloomberg carries this report from the opening with lots of interesting commentary about relative value, Indonesia and the market price for Contemporary Chinese Art. Some random quotes from the Bloomberg story (presented out of order for dramatic effect):

Daniel Komala, president and co-founder of Larasati, said the financial crisis is likely to affect the more expensive works as collectors opt instead for cheaper, emerging artists.“When a big ship like the U.S. is sinking, that would be a big danger to anybody in any business,” he said in an interview at the Oct. 3 preview. “The financial meltdown will affect the top layers. Rather than buy a $1 million painting you would probably buy a few pieces of $100,000 each.” [ . . . ]

“There’s going to be some impact, but in Asia there’s still a lot of disposable income,” said Chen Shen Po, director of ArtSingapore, Southeast Asia’s biggest art fair. “A lot of Southeast Asian artists are still very competitive in pricing and still very affordable.” [ . . .]

“For Chinese art, the price is already too high,” said John Andreas, owner of Borobudur, in an interview. “The top Chinese artists fetch $10 million compared with top Indonesian artists, who fetch only about $1 million. A lot of investors think Indonesian art is still very cheap.”

Singapore Art Sales Aim to Defy Falling Markets, China Slowdown (Bloomberg)