Click here for more information on the exhibition and to visit ShanghART’s website (www.shanghart.com).

Night Tales is a derivative of drifting thinking by Xiang Liqing
Pure implication of the accumulation of knowledge
Visualized rendering of fleeting time
Incapable and hopeless aggregation
Direction that remains tangible yet contradictory
As well as limited warmth full of poetic sonance
They are a collection of sentiments
And they gather and move in endless cycles, regardless of day and night
They come and they go, on daily basis, round and round

Night Tales is the infinite imagination.
People are pursuing the possibility in all kinds of impossibilities.
At last the “night” becomes the subject.
Xiang Liqing is interested in substance itself.
He continues to search characteristics of each substance and describes it in his own special ways.
Although they’re unrelated, Xiang Liqing shows his artistic expression through all these different medium substances themselves.

About Xiang Liqing

Xiang Liqing was born in Zhejiang province in 1973. Today he lives and works in Shanghai. Xiang Liqing has exhibited widely in China and internationally. His most recent exhibitions include China Contemporary Art, Architecture and Visual Culture, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (Rotterdam 2006) and Restless, Photography and New Media, Museum of Contemporary Art (ShanghART, 2006).

By Michelle McCoy for the Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, December 2007

Yang Fudong, Honey, 2003, video

Introduction

Located in the hills of La Jolla, a seaside resort community near San Diego, California, the residence of Chris and Eloisa Haudenschild is home to a major U.S. collection of contemporary Chinese video art and photography. It includes the work of roughly twenty-eight Chinese artists, including, significantly, Song Tao’s Life is Wonderful (2003), a large floor-top photo installation; Honey 2 (2003), a video by Hugo Boss Prize-nominated Yang Fudong; and Xu Zhen’s 1999 photomontage Sewer. In addition, the Haudenschild collection includes roughly one hundred and twenty holdings by ninety artists from the Americas, Europe, and other parts of Asia. Notable pieces include a triptych from Francis Alÿs’s series of paintings titled The Liar (ca. 1995), a photograph of Kristof Wodiczko’s Tijuana Projection (2002), and a painting from Komar & Melamid’s Most Wanted series dated at 2000 by the collector.(1)

The Haudenschilds began collecting contemporary Chinese video and photography in the late 1990s, when these mediums were beginning to become as widely used and important as they are today, and just before the beginning of the market’s current boom. Since then, prices for paintings by a few Chinese artists have topped two million dollars,(2) and domestic collectors have entered the market in a significant way.(3) In November 2006, for instance, a Chinese collector purchased a Liu Xiaodong painting at a Beijing auction for $2.7 million, the highest price paid at auction for a painting by a Chinese artist who began working after 1979. (4)

The current overall global art market also finds that contemporary art has, for the first time, “truly begun to rival the historically dominant Impressionism and Modern categories” at auction.(5) Evidence to the overall market’s growth, The Financial Times has recently been publishing how-to articles about art collecting in general and at least one art hedge fund has been established. Situated within this historic global market growth, expansion into China and other regions is seen as having contributed significantly overall. In addition to the work having dramatically appreciated, China has a new class of art collectors, with new levels of wealth among them. In fact, expansion into China and other “new” regions is often used in the case against the market’s potential crash.

Xu Zhen, Sewer, 1998, photograph

Within this, the private collector maintains a unique position. On the one hand, as Britta Erickson writes, “Private collections are well suited to capturing the life of a vibrant art movement, driven as they are by passion, unencumbered by institutional impedimenta.”(6) Not necessarily affixed to any institution or gallery, today’s private collector has the flexibility to build a historically complete collection, so long as he or she has the means and access to do so. On the other hand, private collectors are not under any obligation to remain loyal to any particular mission. As Lu Jie, founder and director of the Long March Project, said, “ . . . we’ve observed that many [collectors] started out building a big collection and ended up selling the artwork in auctions . . . . It really takes time to get to know what the real agenda is that a collector has.” (7) However, there are standards and traditions by which collectors are judged, which the late Jonathan Napack, former Asia adviser to Art Basel describes: to be considered a “collector,” one must have a certain amount of commitment and knowledge.(8)

Chris and Eloisa Haudenschild’s level of commitment and knowledge is evidenced by the way they support contemporary art beyond collecting. The Haudenschild Foundation supports exhibitions and sponsors artists’ and scholars’ projects and programs such as symposia and residencies at the haudenschildGarage. Perhaps their most ambitious project yet was an exhibition entitled Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection, which took place from 2003 to 2005 and traveled to venues in San Diego, Shanghai, Tijuana, Singapore, and Beijing.

Cao Fei’s and Pi Li’s presentation at the Political Equator Garage Talk at the haudenschildGarage, June 2006

In her catalogue essay for this exhibition, Erickson addresses the collection’s strengths: “Representing a personal vision, it has not been expected to present a complete or historic view of the field. Nevertheless, it has captured a major slice of Chinese photography and video, representative of a signal moment”(9) in the field’s entrance onto the global stage. Scholar Martina Köppel-Yang recognized it as the first collection of its kind, (10) and Tina Yapelli, Director of the University Gallery at San Diego State University and the exhibition’s organizer, lauded it as “the most important collection of contemporary Chinese video and photography in the world.” (11) Lorenz Helbling, the Haudenschilds’ longstanding dealer, writes, “The collection is a very ‘open’ collection . . .. It doesn’t aim to fix images people should have of China, or to transmit stereotypes of China. It’s not about ‘signature works’ or ‘trophy pieces’—it’s more about a spirit, about involvement.” The Haudenschilds, he writes, are “great collectors.”(12)

The Collection

To date, in addition to work by Yang Fudong, Song Tao, and Xu Zhen, the Haudenschild collection consists of works by Cao Fei, Chen Shaoxiong, Feng Mengbo, Geng Jianyi, Gu Dexin, Hai Bo, Hong Hao, Hu Jieming, Kan Xuan, Liu Wei, Lu Chunsheng, Shi Yong, Tang Maohong, Wang Jin, Wang Youshen, Weng Fen, Xiang Liqing, Yang Yong, Yang Zhenzhong, Yu Youhan, Zhao Bandi, Zhao Nengzhi, Zheng Guogu, Zhou Tiehai, and Zhu Jia. All of the works in the collection are photography, video/animation or computer graphics, or photo-based installations, except for two oil paintings and one print. The photographs are from editions of one hundred or smaller, with the majority of them from editions of ten or fewer. All of the videos are from editions of fewer than ten. (13)

Yang Zhenzhong, 922 Rice Corns, 2000, video

Of these seventy individual works produced by twenty-eight artists, two of the works were produced by women artists: Cao Fei and Kan Xuan. Three of the artists are thirty years old or younger, while ten are between thirty-one and forty, fourteen are between forty-one and fifty, and one artist is over sixty. Most of them are based in Shanghai, with a few based in Beijing, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Yangjiang, Guangzhou, and Haikou, Hainan. Only Kan Xuan maintains a residence both in Beijing and abroad, in Amsterdam.

Eloisa Haudenschild said she is primarily interested in collecting as a way to assist and connect with emerging artists. She explained that when artists have been recognized and supported by other collectors, she maintains relationships with them, but her interest shifts from collecting their work to assisting them in other ways, such as funding projects. With charismatic ebullience, Haudenschild said she has never sold a work, nor has she bought work by an artist she has not met. She has never attempted to acquire work from an artist directly and has always used an agent or dealer. She said she has never asked the price of an artwork. The works have been acquired through studio visits and meetings with artists, stories she recounts with pleasure. Haudenschild refers to the first trips in which she began to acquire Chinese artwork as “my love affair.” (14)

Background

Eloisa Haudenschild, née Rodriguez-Carbornell, was born into an affluent family in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who were involved in real estate and politics. When asked, she said she probably could be considered a third- or fourth-generation collector, and keeps some of her family’s paintings and antiques in the La Jolla estate. She met Chris Haudenschild, an astrophysicst-entrepreneur and native of Los Angeles, skiing in Portillo in 1973. Chris Haudenschild, who has roots in Iowa and Indiana, is a first generation collector. Together they have two daughters, Rita and Anna, whose artwork is also listed in the collection’s catalogue.

Eloisa Haudenschild, Laura Zhou, and Ma Shulin (Deputy Director, National Art Museum of China) at the opening of Zooming into Focus, November 2005, National Art Museum of China, Beijing

Eloisa Haudenschild’s educational background is in psychology. She was involved in dance and choreography before pursuing her interest in contemporary art. She cut her art-collecting teeth in the early 1990s with contemporary work from Latin America. At that time, she was president of the bi-national board of inSite, a network of contemporary art programs and commissioned projects that map the liminal border area of San Diego and Tijuana.

Haudenschild said, “I traveled with the board and the directors to Mexico City every two months or so, visiting artists and studios, traveling with them and having fun. That afforded me the opportunity of meeting some extraordinary artists like Francis Alÿs, a good friend, who together with other good friends have since become international figures in the art world. There, I really got a firsthand experience of the situation. I saw firsthand their need of support.”

When Chris Haudenschild, founder and president of CliniComp, a healthcare information management system, began expanding his business into China, the couple began making regular trips to Shanghai. As she had done in Latin America, Eloisa Haudenschild sought to investigate the local art scene in Shanghai.

Approach

Participants in the symposium “Distance—A Discussion on Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video” at the China Art Academy, Hangzhou, March 2004. Left to right: Pi Li, Eloisa Haudenschild, Waling Boers, Martina Koppel-Yang, Laura Zhou, Evelyne Jouanno, Hou Hanru, Jonathan Napak, Rudolf Stoert, Anna Haudenschild, Chris Haudenschild, Rita Haudenschild, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Wang Gongxin, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Wang Du, Zhang Peili, and Zheng Shengtian

Fueled by passion and confidence, she says, they acquired twenty works with their first purchase of Chinese art. Her husband was very supportive, encouraging her to take those twenty and, in her words, “double it up—go for forty or fifty.”

Haudenschild recounts the late 1990s as an environment very different from the art world in the large urban centers of today’s China. “I spent a lot of time looking around,” she said of her first trips. “My husband and I went to the Shanghai Art Museum and saw a show of work by the Corsinos, a brother and sister who live in France. I was so moved by the work, and was bummed about not being able to share it with anyone. It was so nice to see something besides calligraphy and ink washes. I thought, ‘Somebody did this, some curator—someone has this sensibility,’ but I didn’t know who it was. So, I saw this guy walking around [the Shanghai Art Museum] who looked a little like Salvador Dali. I thought, ‘I’m going to ask this guy.’ And of course, it was Dadou.”

Dadou, or Davide Quadrio, founded BizArt, a self-supported non-profit gallery, in Shanghai in 1998. Along with ShanghART, it shares billing as one of the oldest contemporary art institutions in the city.

“I said [to Dadou], I’ve been coming here for three years, where is the artwork?’ He said, ‘Go to ShanghART and see Lorenz.’ So, my husband and I immediately caught a cab and went to [the gallery in] Fuxing Park. As you may know, getting around in those days wasn’t as easy as it is now.”

“I walked into [ShanghART]. Then, I met Laura Zhou,” Mr. Helbling’s partner at ShanghART. “It was genius from that moment on with Laura. . . . We are very close. She calls me ‘mommy.’”

Previously, Mr. Helbling had been showing work at the Portman Ritz-Carlton Hotel, a massive hotel, convention centre and residence in Shanghai. “He used to carry paintings around on the back of his motorcycle trying to sell them, because at that time he didn’t have a space,” recounts Haudenschild. Since then, ShanghART has moved from its Fuxing Park location and expanded into three different spaces within Shanghai. A fourth space opened this year in Beijing.

“I loved the continual excitement. The best part was going to studios and apartments to look at the work,” Haudenschild says. Effusive with praise for Mr. Helbling, she said, “[Lorenz] is so good. If I wanted something and he wasn’t working with that artist, he’d get it for me. For instance Cao Fei. He facilitated that…You know, Lorenz wouldn’t sell to just anybody. He’s not as concerned with making a profit. We work together; he really wants to support the artists.”

She said he has never given her explicit advice, saying, “You know how it is with Lorenz, you never know [what he’s really thinking]. He’ll listen, smoking, with his coffee. And then he’ll say, ‘Eloisa, I think it’s time to think.’” Helbling and Zhou did, however, encourage her to look at certain artists.

After that initial trip, Haudenschild says she did a fair amount of research, contacting and meeting with scholars and curators in the field. She went to Paris and met with Hou Hanru, and exchanged emails with Britta Erickson. Perhaps in testament to the perceived need for a studied, serious, aesthetics-based treatment of contemporary Chinese art, Haudenschild said her queries to these noted curators and scholars—“from me, this little collector”—were enthusiastically received. Meantime, she continued collecting on her regular trips to China.

Yang Fudong, City Light, 2000, video

Collecting Video And Photography

In general, photography and video, like other edition-based media, have traditionally sold for less than paintings. Despite their lower value within the market, however, these media, as previously mentioned, are important to contemporary Chinese art and often become vehicles for highly conceptual projects. Critic and scholar Lu Leiping describes photography and video as the “most experimental and pioneering media today,” and “the media that more strongly maintain the Chinese characteristics.” (15) Indeed, many artists represented in the Haudenschild collection work solely in photography and video, and several are now highly sought after in large international exhibitions and biennials.

Haudenschild describes the process of arriving at the collection’s focus on video and photography as a product of following her own instincts. “You have to trust your eye,” she said. “I just get what I like, and the video and photography were what I liked . . .. There’s no one telling me what to do.” “I did not initially intend to collect video and photography,” she said, asserting that certain works she selected, such as Yang Fudong’s The First Intellectual photographs, did not initially appear collectible. When asked why more people don’t collect video, her response was, “I don’t know. Maybe they just haven’t warmed up to it yet.”

Art: The “Alternative Asset Class”

Mainstream media outlets have described the recent growth in art investment in the overall market. “Art has emerged as a serious alternative asset class in the past few years, in spite of the disdain of art lovers and the skepticism of many dealers and collectors,” wrote Deborah Brewster in an article about art collecting that appeared in the July 13, 2007 issue of The Financial Times.(16) She continues:

“Randall Willette, who advises collectors, says: ‘There are increasingly two types of buyer in the market. The idea that you should buy purely because of your passion is becoming less common. More buyers are coming from a financial background and people want to support their buying decisions with financial information. Increasingly, art is part of the balance sheet of private clients.’” (17)

Indeed, much of the current dialogue surrounding contemporary Chinese art, and contemporary art as a whole, is in the language of finance.

Texas-based venture capitalist and wildcatter oil tycoon Robert Chaney speaks in such financial terms about his extensive contemporary Chinese art holdings. On the eve of the current exhibition of his collection at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Red Hot: Asian Art Now, Chaney described his strategy for “acquiring masterpieces,” using a method that is, in his words, a studied adaptation of the Warren Buffet model for investing. In the meantime, Chaney invited art dealers to sit on a panel in conjunction with the exhibition and encouraged Houston galleries to hold concurrent exhibitions of Asian art. Chaney seems determined to establish himself as an important, involved collector who also vocalizes his financial interest in the art world. (18)

Haudenschild, on the other hand, downplays herself as an investor. “I think I am not a good collector,” she joked, pausing in front of I Usually Wait Under the Arch Roof for Sunshine, a 2001 photograph by Hong Hao, who is well known for his photographs of densely accumulated objects. “For instance, the smart collector would’ve gotten [the accumulated object photos]. But me, I liked this one.”

Mrs. Haudenschild stands apart from the object-focused connoisseur as well, giving importance instead to her relationships with artists and members of the community. “For me, the collecting is just a token, a way to support these young guys . . . . The reward is that I have the opportunity to be part of their path.” She affectionately describes the relationships among the artists represented in her collection, noting that they have maintained their integrity and loyalty to one another as friends in spite of experiencing unequal degrees of recognition. “You know, there are many collectors who are buying pieces and then putting them away until they become valuable—they don’t even show the work. And that is such a waste—these people need exposure,” she said.

Eloisa Haudenschild with Chen Shaoxiong, Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen, Shi Yong, Yang Fudong, and Song Tao, February 2003

Future Of The Market

Speculations on a crash or correction in the global and Chinese contemporary art markets circulate. Commenting on the market in general, Los Angeles-based billionaire collector Eli Broad was quoted in The New York Times in August 2007 as saying, “We’ve seen an unprecedented 68 appreciation of contemporary art in the thirty-five years that I’ve been collecting . . . . We’re bound to have a correction. I don’t know if it will happen at the November auctions, or it will happen next May.” (19) Other recent articles have described the Chinese market as “bubbly,” (20) and the overall market as “overblown,” (21) and “showing signs of a bubble.” (22)

Jonathan Napack wrote of a grim future, with a specific focus on China: “The current ‘boom’ in the Chinese economy is all about positioning and manipulating perceptions to help attain certain short-term goals. This infects the art world as much as anybody else.” He wrote, “It will one day crash, when the speculators who are now blindly following their ‘advisors’ realize prices have started to fall and dump their collections on the market.” (23)

Echoing Broad’s sentiments about the overall market, Eloisa Haudenschild commented on the contemporary Chinese art market’s future, saying, “I’m worried about the market. Will there be a crash or a correction? Hopefully it will be a correction. But [regardless, as a collector,] you either have integrity or you don’t.”

Li Xu (Curator), Zhang Peili (Artist and Director, New Media Department of China Art Academy), Eloisa Haudenschild, Li Xiangyang (then Executive Director, Shanghai Art Museum), and Lorenz Helbling (Director, ShanghART), Shanghai Art Museum Press Conference and Opening for Zooming into Focus, February 2004.

Questions Remain

Art collected by individuals from a different country than the origin of the artist is now a common practice. Today, there are numerous galleries dealing exclusively in contemporary Chinese art in cities around the Western hemisphere. The question of what influence the foreign collector of contemporary Chinese art has on the globalized art world is a complex one.

Lu Jie put foreign collectors in a positive light, saying, “[the artists] feel more confident to have their works sent abroad. They respect the international collectors more and believe they are the real collectors. The local collectors very often use the building of a collection as an introduction or entry into the market. The artists feel safer with their work in foreign collections.” (24) There is also the idea that foreign collectors have helped contemporary Chinese art to be seen as valuable within China. Haudenschild said that the most important works in her collection have been shown at the Shanghai Art Museum and the National Museum of China in Beijing because she knows “how important it was for these young artists to get there.”

“Foreign collectors held out [the] olive branch,” according to critic Lu Leiping, in influencing the establishment of serious interest in contemporary Chinese new media art such as that in the Haudenschild Collection. (25) Jonathan Napack wrote: “That is not to say that there is no real basis for the current foreign interest in Chinese art. This huge country, for so long off the map, is producing artists who can draw on a wellspring of images, concepts, and issues that are totally unique to China and produce works that have that elusive ‘local flavour’ increasingly rare in a globalized world.” (26) However, an often-discussed problem is that the possibility for this “local flavour” is diminished once the artwork is brought to market.

A less-discussed question, whose answer remains to be seen, is, as they become part of the global art market, how are China and other “new markets” for contemporary art changing it? Will contemporary Chinese art be subsumed by the same practice seen in the Euro-American art market of limitation and marginalization of different groups, such as women and minority artists? Consistent with Western art, works by male Chinese artists generally sell for more at auction than those of women. Living Han male artists have appeared much more prominently in the exhibitions of important collections. This also fits with the Western art historical tradition of marginalizing, ignoring, and dismissing women artists within Chinese art history. (27) Just as Chinese art, which has not reached the heights that Euro-American art does at auction, is marginalized by art world regionalism, female Chinese artists may be marginalized even more.

Here again, private collections occupy a unique space. Private collections, “driven as they are by passion, unencumbered by institutional impedimenta” (as Erickson was quoted as saying in the introduction to this essay), are truly private in nature, and do not fall under the type of public scrutiny that attempts to address and confront the gender- and ethnicity-based biases about an artwork’s value that is at work in public collections. In addition, through the funding of exhibitions, the establishment of art centers, and the lending of artworks, private collections may indirectly promote the marginalizing practices of the institutional and historical art worlds. On the other hand, private collections also present the possibility of freely challenging and questioning such biases, which, as attested to by Lorenz Helbling, is perhaps what Eloisa Haudenschild has attempted to do.

The impact an individual collector can have on the market is another question. One of the indicators by which to measure the success of an artist is his or her inclusion in important and well-known collections. It follows that the larger and more important the collection, the more influence on the market the collector has. As Napack wrote of the recent inflation, “It prices younger or novice collectors out of the market, leaving many artists vulnerable to the whims of a few deep-pocketed collectors.” (28)

Finally, it remains to be seen how the market’s inflation will affect the artworks themselves. Napack wrote, “The current infusion of cash into the market brings [first-rate galleries] some short-term profits, but it is also destructive in the long run. It inflates the expectations of artists and makes them even more exploitative of their galleries.” (29) Marc Spiegler of New York magazine wrote, “Historically bad markets tend to produce better art—there’s less pressure on artists to produce and fewer temptations to sell out, and they’re dealing only with collectors and galleries willing to ride out the hard times.” (30)

Haudenschild stressed that ultimately what remains important to her is having the ability to support emerging artists and connect people in dialogue. She said, “The inflation of the market is problematic. When I was starting to collect, it was like these guys could really benefit from my collecting their work . . .. A lot of bad work has come to auction recently.”

She said, “You know, Chinese art has become this kind of cliché.” Gesturing around the garage that houses many of the collection’s significant photographs, including Yang Fudong’s The First Intellectual series of photos (2000), Song Tao’s In Loud Crowds I Dream of Hanging Myself (2002), and Lu Chunsheng’s Water photos (2002), she said, “I’m thankful I was able to get these pieces, but I know it’s become a little bit like a fashion show.” Expressing an increased interest in funding projects, she said, “I’m not even sure I want to be a collector anymore. But I have to make a choice that I can live with.”

——
Notes

1 Plates of much of the Chinese collection can be found in the exhibition catalogue, Zooming Into Focus: Contemporary Photography and Video Art from the Haudenschild Collection, Shi Yong and Laura Zhou, eds. (Shanghai: ShanghART, 2005). Images of the Haudenschild’s other holdings may be found at www.haudenschildgarage.com.

2 David Barboza, “In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism,” New York Times, January 4, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/arts/design/04arti.html

3 “Chinese art is now beginning to be aggressively collected by the Chinese themselves,” said Boriana Song, manager of the Chinese-owned Beijing Art Now Gallery. ”But now Chinese buyers are hungry for culture, and they see contemporary art as fashionable. The market is maturing, tastes are changing, and more than 60% of our clients are local Chinese.” Pallavi Aiyar, “Modern art scene grabbing investors,” Asia Times Online, April 11, 2006, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/HD11Cb05.html .

4 Barboza, “In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism.”

5 Marc Spiegler, “Five Theories On Why the Art Market Can’t Crash (and Why It Will Anyway),” New York, April 3, 2006,
http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/16542/ .

6 Britta Erickson, “Zooming Into Focus, Sliding Into History,” in Zooming Into Focus, 14–15.

7 Lu Jie, “Contemporary Art in Greater China: Under Pressure, A Discussion at the 52nd Venice Biennale,” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (September 2007), 8–24.

8 Jonathan Napack, “An Art Market With Chinese Characteristics,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (March 2006), 16–17.

9 Erickson, “Zooming Into Focus, Sliding Into History,” in Zooming Into Focus, 14–15.

10 Martina Koppel-Yang, “Compelling Images of a Distant Life, Video as Expansion of Reality,” in Zooming Into Focus, 71–72.

11 Erickson, “Zooming Into Focus, Sliding Into History,” in Zooming Into Focus, 14–15.

12 Ibid.

13 Information about the collection provided by the haudenschildGarage.

14 Statements by and biographical information about Mrs. Haudenschild based on a conversation at the haudenschildGarage on September 5, 2007, a telephone conversation on September 12, 2007, and e-mail exchange.

15 Lu Leiping, “When Experiment Encounters Classics,” in Zooming Into Focus, 19–21.

16 Deborh Brewster, “Investing in the art market,” Financial Times, July 13, 2007, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a531d0d2-3153-11dc-891f-0000779fd2ac.html .

17 Ibid.

18 Kelly Klaasmeyer, “RED HOT: Asian Art From the Chaney Family Collection,” Houston Press, September 13, 2007, http://www.houstonpress.com/2007-09-13/culture/red-hot-business/ .

19 Robin Pogrebin, “Volatile Markets? Art World Takes Stock,” New York Times, August 29, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/arts/design/29mark.html, accessed 08/24/07 .

20 Barboza, “In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism.”

21 Spiegler, “Five Theories On Why the Art Market Can’t Crash (and Why It Will Anyway).”

22 Sharon Reier, “Contemporary Art: Follow the Money—The Latest Status Investment is Showing Signs of a Bubble,” International Herald Tribune, January 27, 2007, http://w4.stern.nyu.edu/news/news.cfm?doc_id=6894 .

23 Napack, “An Art Market With Chinese Characteristics,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (March 2006), 16–17.

24 Lu Jie, “Contemporary Art in Greater China: Under Pressure, A Discussion at the 52nd Venice Biennale,” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, September/Fall 2007, 8–24.

25 Lu Leiping, “When Experiment Encounters Classics,” in Zooming Into Focus, 19–21.

26 Napack, “An Art Market With Chinese Characteristics,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (March 2006), 16–17.

27 Marsha Weidner, preface to Flowering in the Shadows, Women in the History of Chinese and Japanese Painting, ed. Marsha Weidner (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), xi–xiv.

28 Napack, “An Art Market With Chinese Characteristics,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (March 2006), 16–17.

29 Ibid.

30 Spiegler, “Five Theories on Why the Art Market Can’t Crash (and Why It Will Anyway).”

Coinciding with the anniversary of the “Art For Sale” exhibition, the haudenschildGarage held a Ten Year Reunion Celebration for artists, critics, and curators on January 18, 2009 in Shanghai and on January 20, 2009 in Beijing.

Organized by Laura Zhou and Lorenz Helbling, some attendees included Li Xiangyang, Liu Wei, Yang Fudong, Yang Zhenzong, Shi Yong, Song Tao, Xiang Liqing, Wang Youshen, Zhu Jia, Yang Enli, Zhao Bandi, Lisa Movius, Tang Maohong, Hu Jieming, Lynn Zhang, Zhou Tiehai, Ding Yi, Helen Zhu, Chen Ya, Lu Leiping, Florence Dinar, Shaway Yeh and Xu Zhen.

The Haudenschild Collection was the inspiration for the exhibition City Lights: Shanghai – Los Angeles on view from November 7 – December 17, 2006. The exhibition was organized by Yeonsoo Chee and examined contemporary life in Shanghai and Los Angeles. Chee writes that these cities were “two of the most dynamic and influential urban centers of the 21st century. On the streets—and in the artists’ images—of these two great metropolises are played out many of the issues confronting post-modern society: the globalization of markets and cultures, the search for individual identity in the face of homogenization, the proliferation of artifice and spectacle, the excesses of consumer culture, and the endless sprawl of urban development.” Click here for more information about the exhibition.

Works on loan for this exhibition included Lui Wei Unlimited 2004; Yang Fudong City Light 2000 (video); Song Tao In Loud Crowds I Dream of Hanging Myself 2 2002; Yang Fudong Honey 5, 2003; Yang Fudong Honey 2003 (video); Xiang Liqing Rock Never (Facades) #2 2002.  The Los Angeles portion of the exhibition featured works by Uta Barth, Martin Kersels, Michael Light, Robbert Flick, and Melanie Pullen.

Lui Wei, Unlimited, 2004

Yang Fudong, Honey, 2003 Video

The Haudenschild Collection was the inspiration for the exhibition City Lights: Shanghai – Los Angeles at the University Art Gallery, CSULB on view November 7 – December 17, 2006. The exhibition was organized by Yeonsoo Chee and it examined contemporary life in Shanghai and Los Angeles. Chee writes that these cities were “two of the most dynamic and influential urban centers of the 21st century. On the streets—and in the artists’ images—of these two great metropolises are played out many of the issues confronting post-modern society: the globalization of markets and cultures, the search for individual identity in the face of homogenization, the proliferation of artifice and spectacle, the excesses of consumer culture, and the endless sprawl of urban development.”

Song Tao, In Loud Crowds I Dream of Hanging Myself 2, 2002

Yang Fudong, City Light, 2000 Video

Works on loan for this exhibition included Lui Wei Unlimited (2004); Yang Fudong City Light (2000) video; Song Tao In Loud Crowds I Dream of Hanging Myself 2 (2002); Yang Fudong Honey 5 (2003); Yang Fudong Honey (2003) video; Xiang Liqing Rock Never (Facades) #2 (2002).  The Los Angeles portion of the exhibition featured works by Uta Barth, Martin Kersels, Michael Light, Robbert Flick, and Melanie Pullen.

On November 16, 2006 Eloisa Haudenschild was in conversation with CSULB Professor Todd Gray as part of the exhibition.

Click here for more information about the exhibition.

Xiang Liqing, Rock Never, 2002

Yang Fudong, Honey 5, 2003

Marking many important milestones, Zooming into Focus: Chinese Contemporary Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection (2003 – 2005) was the first exhibition of its kind in San Diego and Singapore and the first contemporary Chinese photography exhibition at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico. It was the first time the Shanghai Art Museum exhibited works on contemporary Chinese video and photography from a private collection and most importantly, it was the first retrospective exhibition of Chinese photography and video ever held at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing.

Zooming into Focus investigated the effects of accelerated change in China through the work of the country’s most talented emerging artists. The swift transformation of Chinese culture is reflected in the work of each of these represented artists who comment on contemporary Chinese urban life with intelligence, wit, foreboding and nostalgia.

The works of Cao Fei, Chen Shaoxiong, Feng Mengbo, Geng Jianyi, Hong Hao, Hu Jieming, Kan Xuan, Lui Wei, Lu Chunsheng, Shi Yong, Song Tao, Tang Maohong, Wang Youshen, Weng Fen, Xiang Liqing, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yang Yong, Yang Zhenzhong, Zhao Bandi, Zheng Gougu and Zhu Jia were included in this exhibitions. Other artists in the collection include Gu Dexin, Hai Bo, Wang Jin, Zhou Tiehai, Yu Youhan, and Zhao Nengzhi.

Lorenz Helbling and Laura Zhou supported all exhibitions and organized the Hangzhou symposium at the China Art Academy. Shi Yong was responsible for designing the Zooming into Focus catalog and the installation design of Zooming into Focus at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing.

In addition to the traveling exhibitions, two symposia were held: An International Discourse on New Chinese Video and Photography at the San Diego Museum of Art and Envisioning the Future of Contemporary Art from Different Glocal Positions at the China National Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China. Participants included Xu Bing, Waling Boers, Fan Di’an, Huang Du, Britta Erickson, Hu Fang, Yang Fudong, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Wang Gogxin, Hou Hanru, Betti-Sue Hertz, Xu Jiang, Evelyne Jouanno, Mami Kataoka, Martina Koppel-Yang, Pi Li, Barbara London, Zhang Peili, Christopher Phillips, Zheng Shengtain, Karen Smith, Rudolf Stoert, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Li Xianyang, Li Xu, Mo Zhelan, and Qiu Zhijie.

The haudenschildGarage launched their residency program in 2003 which invited Chinese artists and curators for the first time to the United States. Shi Yong and Yang Zhenzhong were the first artists in residence and Hou Hanru, Cao Fei, Yong Fudong, Laura Zhou, Lorenz Helbling, Evelyn Jouanno, and Victoria Lu were also invited to the Garage. Both Shi Yong and Yang Zhenzhong produced new works commissioned by the haudenschildGarage while in residence.

Born in Buenos Aires and currently residing in San Diego, California, Eloisa Haudenschild, has one of the largest collections for contemporary Chinese photography and video art. “Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Photography and video from the Haudenschild Collection” exhibitions in US, China and Mexico included a schedule of Symposia, artist residency programs, commissioned works and a series of lectures, performance, video dialogues and screenings in US, China and Mexico. A passionate collector and art patron, Eloisa Haudenschild was interviewed after her appearance in Hong Kong in July 2004 for her talk on collecting at Bloomberg’s Hong Kong corporate headquarters. The following interview was conducted via emails.

[EH= Eloisa Haudenschild / PW= Phoebe Wong]

PW:    When and why did you start collecting contemporary Chinese video and photography?

EH:    My husband Chris and I started travelling to China on business five years ago. My experience as a collector of Latin American Art fueled my interest and appreciation for upcoming artists in different parts of the world. I tried to find connections with the art world and young artists. After a couple of years of searching we found in Shanghai the first group of artists that are today part of our collection. It was not my initial goal to have a collection of solely photography and video, but soon I realized that they were the media in which the artists were doing the most interesting work in my opinion.

PW:    What was your first piece in the collection? In what way, if any, does it help or determine your future direction?

EH:    There was not a first piece in the collection; there were a few artists I had collected initially. They included Yang Fudong, Shi Yong, Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen, Xiang Liqing, and Zheng Guogu and I met them personally in Shanghai and Guangzhou.

After my first encounter, I came back home and started doing some more research. That is how I met Hou Hanru, Huang Yongping, Wang Du, Yang Jiechang (he is part of the collection) and Martina Koeppel-Yang in Paris. Later, generous curators and artists, who are dear friends today, supported our first symposium in San Diego, California. They were Christopher Phillips, Barbara London,  Britta Erickson, Xu Bing, and Prof. Wu Hung, who wrote one of the essays for the exhibition catalogue of Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection. More fascinating people participated in our symposium in Hangzhou.

Subsequent trips brought artists Cao Fei, Chen Shaoxiong, Feng Mengbo, Hong Hao, Weng Fen, Yang Yong, Zhao Bandi, and Song Tao into the collection, all artists from Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Haikuo.

PW:    Did you gradually develop a theme in your collection, such as, urbanism?

EH:    Youth and urbanism seem to be very strong issues for these artists in the above-mentioned exhibition. It is expressed in different ways, often with images filled with fantasy and longing.

PW:    Indeed, the collection can be seen through the thread of “constructed visual fictions” as Wu Hung has commented. Also, you mainly collect works from artists who live and work in Shanghai and Guangzhou – two highly commercialised cities and in rapid transition.

EH:    Yes, I enjoy the unique and thoughtful way the artists from the south, they are individuals who operate independently.

PW:    To offer a better understanding of the context of the works (collection), what are the readings you suggest concerning what has given rise to these works?

EH:    Chinese Art at the Crossroads by Prof. Wu Hung and On the Mid-Ground by Hou Hanru are two very important books. Also there are a variety of articles by scholars and curators like Britta Erickson, Martina Koeppel-Yang, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Li Xu, Zheng Shengtian, and others that shed light into this new and exciting moment in contemporary Chinese art.

PW:    Are you among those collectors who also commission new work and offer residencies?

EH:    My interest in collecting extends beyond the acquisition of art works. Collecting allows me to share in the artist’s journey, to participate in the process at a point when I can make a difference in the career of these young artists. My interest extends to the creation of educational programs, residencies (Yang Zhenzhong and Shi Yong at present) and the commissioning of new pieces.

PW:    Using the work of Shi Yong as an example, how did the residency unfold?

EH:    I believe the launching of “Super Angel I” and “Super Angel II” on the internet, Shi Yong’s project in collaboration with the students at San Diego State University, was very interesting and complex. Once the data was gathered for a few months, Shi Yong came to San Diego, interacted with artists on both sides of the US/Mexico border and students. The final phase of the project was an interactive performance.

PW:    Being described as “one of the most important collections of contemporary Chinese art in the world”, indeed, how large is the Haudenschild Collection, to date? And, what is your future direction in collecting?

EH:    The exhibition Zooming into Focus is only one part of the collection. Artists like Yang Jiechang, Gu Dexin, Wang Jin, Wang Youshen, Zhou Tiehai, Hai Bo, Yu Youhan, Zhao Nengzhi are included in the collection as well. The collection, now numbering over 60 pieces, will continue growing; we are constantly in the process of buying new works from new artists and are continuing to buy more works from artists already part of the collection – there is always a long wish list.

My commitment to the artists is to continue exposing their work, having the collection travel, supporting the development of the artists, and opening opportunities to them. Most importantly is my relationship with the artists – I think of them as friends. I only collect works from artists I know personally, I live surrounded by their work, I have never sold a piece of any of our collections, and do not purchase works that I feel exploit the exotic or the oriental. I have supported the participation of many Chinese artists in exhibitions such as the Venice Bienale, “Past and Reverse” at the San Deigo Museum of Art, and as well at Berkeley University in San Francisco.

The collaboration with international institutions was key to our project as was the organisation of lectures, symposia, video screenings, and video premieres – activities that took place in the US, China and Mexico.

PW:    Your being an avid collector, I am able to the feel emotional investment in your collection and in your endeavour to bring educational programmes to it. In hindsight, do you think your collection reflects your sensibility, or, offers you a new understanding of yourself? As for the works shown in the exhibition as well as in your talk, they are edgy works – some rather provocative.

EH:    I imagine the collection reflects my interest in the discovery of new and untapped works and artists. I enjoy participating in the artist’s process and development as much as I can.

—–
Having studied in design and cultural anthropology, Phoebe Wong is a Hong Kong-based culture worker specialising in art, design and visual media. She is currently a researcher of the Asia Art Archive.

Part 1

When Eloisa Haudenschild decided to collect Chinese contemporary art mainly in the forms of photography and video, her American colleagues did not show particular interest about her ‘adventurous’ plan. From a traditional point of view, art works from these young Chinese artists are obviously not ‘classical’ enough; furthermore, the nature of photography and video is hard to preserve and easy to be duplicated. Therefore, these media forms are generally avoided by collectors. However, when Zooming into Focus: Chinese Contemporary Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection came into existence in San Diego, California at the SDSU Art Gallery, with vivid personalities and full of vitality, Eloisa had made her point clear: “never be afraid, always trust your eyes.”

In fact, Zooming into Focus is not new to the Chinese contemporary art community. On one hand, as a touring exhibition, it was shown at the Shanghai Art Museum last year; on the other hand, these works have traveled to the Venice Biennial, Italy; Shanghai Biennial; Kassel, Germany; Yokohana Triennial, Japan; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, they have been represented in China and also sent to international cultural exchange events. However, the Zooming into Focus re-exhibition at the National Art Museum of China has its legendary and historic significance.

It is common knowledge that the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) made a clear distinction with experimental arts since the gun shooting incident of 1989 at the Beijing Contemporary Art Exhibition. Only after the Shanghai Biennial (2000) and the Guangzhou Triennial (2002) the Chinese government started lifting the ban of conceptual arts such as installations and images. However, NAMOC, due to the fact that it is located in the capital, maintained its insistence on “framed” art work. Although the exhibition Era of Opening up in celebration of the opening of the new permanent hall had included a few new media art works as well as ‘framed’ art works, but they were still main stream compared with ‘unframed’ ones.

The National Art Exhibition and the Beijing Biennial Art Exhibition held by the Art Association also excluded ‘unframed’ works, although the quality and quantity of new media artists, conceptual artists, and non-government art organizations in Beijing were far out-numbered anywhere else in the country. In fact, ‘framed’ or ‘unframed’ have no direct relationship with the quality of the works. Many avant-garde experimental arts had also adopted traditional media such as ‘framed’ paintings or sculptures; at the same time, art forms like behavioral, installation, photography and video, with decades of history, produced many classical works.

Officials at the Ministry of Culture understood the connections, and under the condition ‘to seek common ground while reserving differences’, they held many contemporary art exhibitions mainly in the form of new media art as international cultural exchange projects. For example, Living in Time, Hamburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, Germany, 2002; Centre National d’Art et de Culture, Georges Pompidou; and Venice Biennial China Art Hall, with the free and diversified art ecology from both in and outside the country.

NOMAC as the symbol of Art Center has lost the need to be a vacuum fortress, the ice has started melting between the so called ‘framed’ and ‘unframed’ art. At this moment, foreign collectors have held out olive branch, Zooming into Focus therefore has become the first to hold a Chinese contemporary photography and video exhibition at the National Museum of Art.

Part 2

‘Experiments’ and ‘classics’ are not totally opposite concepts. From the tense perspective, ‘experiment’ is inclined to the continuous tense, while ‘classic’ belongs to the past tense. However, ‘experiments’ do not necessarily generate ‘classics’; the factors of ‘classics’ are rather complicated. The word ‘classics’ has been paraphrased as: works that are authoritative. However, who defines ‘authoritativeness’ Not individuals or organizations. In fact, politics, religions, economics or pure art forms can all influence whether a work is ‘classic’ or not. Therefore, time is the real judge. ‘Classics’ are those artworks proven by time.

Although the Zooming into Focus collection will be exhibited at the National Arts Museum of China (NAMOC), which symbolizes ‘authoritativeness’, one cannot simply classify these works as ‘classics’. The exhibition cannot be considered an experimental art exhibition either. As the history of photography and video works as experimental art has already become the past, one could say their ‘experiments’ are the past and present tense.

So, what motivated Eloisa to collect such works, taking meticulous care of them, and introducing them to people with joy? She is so confident: “the reason I only collect video and photography is because in my opinion it is the media that produces the most interesting works.”

Similar opinion is held by Per Bjarne Boym, former director of National Art Museum of Norway, when he was the curator of A Facile Task – Shanghai Puzzle (2000-2004) he too selected only videos. When the writer asked him about the reason, he said “most of the best works I have seen in Shanghai are videos”. In addition, works shown at Kassel, Germany and Venice Biennial, Italy in recent years, were mainly video or video installations: such as Yang Fudong’s An Estranged Paradise and Seven Intellectuals; Chen Shaoxiong’s Anti-Terrorism Variety; Xu Zhen’s Rainbow; Yang Zhenzhong’s Let’s Puff; Feng Mengbo’s Q4U, etc.

Is the Western judgment of ‘good or bad’ prejudiced toward China? There is no doubt that both opinions have a personal aesthetic, however, objectivity still exists. Looking back at the evolvement of Chinese contemporary art since the middle of the 1990s, we have to recognize that photography and video are the most experimental and pioneering media today, it is also the media that more strongly maintains the Chinese characteristics.

In fact, after the 85’s new tide, pioneer Chinese contemporary artists have gradually become used to Western art forms such as installations, conceptual, behavioral, and political pop, and they have started utilizing this new language in their work. Photography originally was not the prevailing art form, in the beginning, it was used as a tool to record conceptual or behavioral art, the same phenomenon later appeared in video art. Avant-garde artists’ experiments have gradually changed from indigenous artist’s groups to artists working independently.

Many artists tired of political pop symbols, resisted western culture colonialism and the fast consuming market abroad and started looking for more suitable art languages in which they could express themselves better and more freely. Their progress mirrors the country’s progress of modernization, commercialization and urbanization. The prevalence of electronic images, digital techniques, and the rapid proliferation of the consuming culture extend the new life of photography and video as the revolution of art language; more importantly, it has changed the vision, imagination, and the way of narrations and criticisms of the artists.

Photography and video have become the media art format growing at the highest speed and the largest in numbers of works produced overnight. Conceptual photography and video have become more independent and mature symbols including, ’sensibility’ which has emerged again in works, differing completely from the artists of earlier days, who used photography and video as pure tools of recording. Some artists have begun to consciously use photography or video as the main language of their experimental creations. artists began to connect the relationship between concepts and images, and to challenge photography and video’s indigenous characteristics of narrative and authenticity. When ’sensitivity’ returned to the language of images, concepts did not disappear, they had been quietly hidden, together with tremendous narratives and prolonged dry preach.

Surreal humor and utopia’s poetry acquired the new password to open the real world. This is not a new invention; it comes from the tradition of Eastern Lao Zhuang’s philosophy and Dynasty We, Jin’s spirits of unconcern of fame and wealth, in contrast to the western’s rhetoric origin of Greek comedy and tragedy. This might be the ever lasting talisman for the bright artists, once the humor and poetry are lost, art will become tasteless and suffocating. This is how classics were inherited and led to the new experiment: photography and video’s new battlefield ‘fictitious reality’ or ‘combined reality’.

In conceptual photography, various poses combined with the power of digital composition are no doubt becoming the major weapon. Representative works of this kind can be found in this exhibition: Weng Fen’s On The Wall is a typical work which depicts China’s urban culture, a young girl riding on a wall representing the boundary between new and old, looking up to mirage-like skyscrapers, with aesthetic fantasy.

Zhao Bandi’s Zhao Bandi & Panda openly conspires with public media, he and his toy panda played the fashion public welfare advertisement series’ ghostly appearing everywhere —- subways, airports and streets, mocking the over – urbanization caused by morbidity, pollution, violence, unemployment, drug addiction, and smoking. In fact, such arrangement has a close relationship with digital combination.

The above two works have both borrowed from digital combination. Only with software such as photoshop, artists could freely modify realities, as magical as wizardry. Yang Zhenzhong attempted to use digital combination to make his Lucky Family photography series as early as 1995. Charmingly naïve chicks were simulated to become different family members, the piece was achieved by using a digital combination technique. Xiang Liqing’s Rock Never cloned many stereotyped Chinese city residences and pieced them together to create many surreal pictures. Shi Yong directly cloned himself in his work You cannot clone it, but you can buy it photographs.

Is this a game? Or is it a nightmare? Maybe it just like what artist Zheng Guogu said: ” I’m using photos to play a game…it has a special charm to me—game is a kind of practice, thinking does not waste any film. I know thinking in this way is only a matter of time to me.”

With respect to conceptual video art, distinctions are also becoming clear: early stage conceptual video was interested in stony and tedious video techniques, originated by artists’ rebellion against the commercialized TV media. While the new generation’s conceptual videos are more infatuated with exaggerated, humorous and dramatic expressions, absurdities directly became the structure of narration in order to choke people up.

For instance, Chen Shaoxiong’s Anti-terrorism Variety installation uses computer animation to suggest the many ways how skyscrapers could avoid being struck by aircraft, using fantasy to mock the chaotic world.

Xu Zhen’s Shouting and Rainbow videos on the other hand, are endowed with a power that is instantly explosive, Shouting played the devilment of shouting in a crowd, using the violence of the human voice. Rainbow showed a body whipped and gradually turned red by a disturbing sound, the artist has applied free and relaxed appearances to the implication of violence. Yang Zhenzhong’s 922 Rice Corns looks at the chicken’s instinct (eating the rice corns) and the human’s futile efforts (counting the rice corns) sneering at those monomaniacs in real life.

The other type of experimental short film came from the film aesthetics experience of non- narrative, utopia’s poetic scenes.

Yang Fudong’s well controlled abstract vocabulary and chaotic space-time turned out ambiguous images in City Light where he is daydreaming and sleepwalking in the city; while Seven Intellectuals was his searching for the password to communicate with ancient scholars their ideal way of living.

Lu Chunsheng’s The History of Chemistry was built upon images of fathomless, paradoxical esteem and introspection; its irrational and mysterious statements construct an illusory world created by massive truths.

At the same time, strong wishes of anti-narrative induced the artists to explore the possibilities of photography and video to interfere with space and human activities. Photo installation, video installation, and interactive installation were coming to existence. For example, Chen Shaoxiong’s Street pieces together two dimensional street scenes into three dimensional models introducing them into the even bigger urban space; then re-recording it onto photography, wandering freely between two dimensional and three dimensional reality and illusiveness.

Another example is Song Tao’s The Floor, which also presents ordinary black and white life images on floorboards, clearing up the boredom and reconstructing life’s interests.

Video installations are easier to be combined with interactions: Yang Zhenzhong’s Let’s Puff is a multi-screen video interaction. In the city scenes being blown away by the girl, audiences may further experience the ‘unbearable lightness’ of life.

Hu Jieming’s Up Up on the other hand, extends the interaction to communicate with audiences. In the 25 televisions vertically installed videos  on a steel structure, 25 meters in total height, A little girl is doomed to climbing up her way like Sisyphus, however, no one will be able to see the moment she arrives at the top, since any surrounding sound could make her pause or drop back.

Additionally, photography and video art’s fast evolvement is directly related to China’s economic environment. Before 2000, the entire art market and exhibition market were at a preliminary stage, most artists’ ‘unframed’ works were fairly poor, and artists needed other jobs as teachers or designers to make a living. Chances of getting sponsorship on making art works or exhibitions were minimal. Therefore, plans of large scale and expensive installation works had to be suspended. Early behavioral art was treated by the Chinese government as evil since it involved pornography and violence.

Photography and video gradually became a more convenient and workable new media. Although the equipment was not cheap, it was relatively easy to borrow; the prevailing personal computer and digital technology allowed for a more “Do It Yourself” (DIY) editing and production. In comparison, photography and video the media lowest in cost, became naturally more widespread.

Due to the restriction of economic conditions, Chinese artists are used to adjust to low costs and small productions. Film proportion is normally kept very high, such as Ju Anqi’s There is a strong wind in Beijing, Yang Zhenzhong’s 922 Rice Corns and others, they all kept film proportion at 1:1. It is not rare to see artists become actors for each other.

Another feature worth noticing is that all the works in this exhibition come from indigenous Chinese artists’ art practice. In fact, considerable differences exist between indigenous and overseas Chinese artists, in terms of ideology and substance of art practice. Overseas Chinese artists under the Western contemporary art environment are more concerned with the origin and success of Chinese culture and the process of globalization. On the other hand local Chinese artists prefer to proceed from China’s modern realities and through experimenting with art languages, they want to present a more personal opinion on society’s explosive change. Therefore, although indigenous art practices utilized common art language — photography and video, no doubt persists in a realism with Chinese characteristics, particularly bringing up questions and introspections on China’s urbanization and fast commercial development.

Part 3

The Zooming into Focus exhibition has recalled some photography and video experiments of China indigenous artists’ since the 1990s and at the same time has emphasized on the past continuous tense of these experiments, which is a past tense.

I would like to bring us back the topic of this article—when experiments come across classics. There are two arguable statements: the first is whether the assumption of ‘experiments come across classics’ is correct? Second, if the assumption is correct, how does experimentation continue?

In fact, the meaning of ‘experiments’ and ‘classics’ are pointing at different subjects. Relatively speaking, experimentation is granted by the artists, however, the meaning of ‘classics’ is originated by the audiences.

Italo Calvino mentioned in his book Why Read the Classics “The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say, ‘I am re-reading . . . ‘ and never ‘I am reading . . . ‘” It pointed here that ‘classics’ is defined by the readers. Pual Connerton made his point in his book How Societies Remember .

Therefore, the creator of the work does not have control whether the work will be classified as ‘classic’; it also does not have any direct relationship with experimentation.

Social memory inevitably influences the creator, as Pual Connerton indicated. The realist is that government permission greatly transformed the original art system. However, experimental art is facing the possibility of systematization and commercialization; this change could be so fast that there will be no time for preparation. Generally speaking, a “classical” work is treated as the standard of aestheticism by art authorities and has become the art market’s favorite.

However, if getting lost in all of the above and confused by the glory of outside commercial and authority of the “classical”, the essence of “classical” will be neglected. This neglect may be the biggest threat to art to rapidly become commercial and systemized – once overly consumed, art experiments and creativity will not be able to differentiate itself from fashion consumption. Let’s keep in mind that in a commercial society, the scope of new and old is not substantive, but only superficial. This is the major difference between art and fashion.

We have to recognize the formidable “consumption power” of the art system and the art market. History has already shown us the outcome of this self –contradiction. Realist Futurists and Dadaists who intended to destroy art as a system turned out to make their works ‘classics’. It is art experimentation and evolution that formidably pushes art history, the art system and the art market’s “self discipline”.

Under this new environmental language, how will artists confront the temptation of systematization and commercial authorities? How will they overcome the inertia problem of creation?   How will they continue with new experiments?

Looking forward …

With the introduction of digital photography and high-tech printing facilities in China in the 1990s, a new generation of artists immediately embraced photo-based media as the perfect means for expressing the changes taking place around them.

The face of the new China is not the medical masks spawned by the SARS outbreak or the bubble- headed visor of the country’s first astronaut. Rather, it is the image of a lone young businessman howling in the middle of an empty highway, having just been hit in the head with a brick. This photograph, The First Intellectual (2000), by Shanghai artist Yang Fudong, captures the anxiety of life in a society undergoing rapid industrialization. And like its subject, the artist himself has been struck by an onslaught of international attention. His work, which sells for around $2,000 to $7,000 for photographs and $6,000 to $10,000 for videos, was featured at the Pompidou Center, the 50th Venice Biennale, Documenta 11, the Fourth Shanghai Biennial, and the First Guangzhou Biennial-all in the last two years. Yang, 32, describes his film Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (2003), which he showed at the Venice Biennale, as one of his favorites. “I have only finished the first part,” he explains. “The whole work will have five parts and should be completed in two years.” The work reflects his early idealism as well as the disillusionment of his generation. “When I was younger, I was very idealistic and had some very pure dreams- deep beliefs that I wished to express,” he says. “The expectation in school when I was growing up was that we’d be inspired to be idealistic and pure and always pursue what we believe. Basically, the beliefs haven’t changed. Yes, school was under the Party,” he continues, “but you also learn to apply these lessons in your own life.”

The current international wave of shows focusing on China’s burgeoning photography and video scene are certain to draw ever larger American and European audiences to artists like Yang. This past summer, the Pompidou Center in Paris opened “Alors le Chine?” (What About China?), an exhibition of contemporary art from China, in conjunction with a cultural-exchange program, L’Annacute de la Chine en France, sponsored by China and France. And through April 21, part two of Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography from the Haudenschild Collection is on view at the art gallery of San Diego State University. The Denver Art Museum is showing, through May 9, Over One Billion Served: Conceptual Photography from the People’s Republic of China Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, curated by Julie Segraves of the Denver-based Asian Art Coordinating Council. Also, this month New York’s Museum of Modern Art has scheduled China Now, a survey of recent video works by 18 Chinese artists, including Yang, organized by film and video curator Barbara London. But the most extensive show is expected to be New Photography from China, a joint effort of the International Center of Photography (ICP) and the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, organized by ICP curator Christopher Phillips and Wu Hung, professor of Asian art at the University of Chicago and consulting curator to the Smart Museum. On view at the ICP and the Asia Society in New York from June through September, the show will include some 100 works by 45 artists.

While the global art world has arrived on China’s shores-including biennials in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and the annual Pingyoa Photography Festival- contemporary artists in China are still relatively isolated, by language and geography, from Western influences. “For the moment,” says Phillips, “Chinese artists are paying attention mostly to their own country and their own context, and that has given recent Chinese art a very interesting and individual stance.”

Phillips notes how “industrialization, urbanization, dislocation of enormous populations from the countryside – the social conditions that spurred an enormous artistic response in the West between 1880 and 1920 – are happening and will continue to happen in China.” But certainly the images he and other curators are finding are a far cry from the pathos-filled village scenes Henri Cartier-Bresson portrayed in 1948 or the nostalgic temples that Lynn Davis created as recently as last year. Today photographers in China are being driven in large part by the swift development of Chinese cities and the introduction of a market economy, just at a time when “globalization” has become the hot topic at international biennials.

Weng Fen, 42, who shows with Courtyard Gallery in Beijing, has created a haunting series of images, which include Sitting on the Wall-Guangzhou No. 2 (2001), and Bird’s Eye View-Shenzhen (2001), in which two schoolgirls in uniform, backs to the camera, look toward the skyline of their once-rural hometown, now populated by skyscrapers. Yang Zhenzhong, 35, represented by ShanghART in Shanghai, will present his videos in the MoMA program, but he has also worked extensively in digital photography. His photo series Light and Easy (2002) shows him walking in city streets, balancing towering office buildings in the palm of his hand (an optical illusion generated in Photoshop), as if urbanization were merely another juggling act. His works sell for around $1,000 to $3,000 (photos) and $5,000 to $10,000 (videos). By contrast, Chen Shaoxiong, 41, favors lower-tech manipulation. This artist takes cutouts of street scenes in China that he had shot just a few years before and holds them up in front of the same, but newly developed, locations today. In the resulting photographs, such as Street-Haizu Square (1999), the juxtapositions of the old and new-bicycles vs. sports cars, kiosks vs. billboards-are disconcerting but beguiling.

Photography is a recent development in China’s relatively young contemporary-art history, which in itself is a post-cultural revolution phenomenon, emerging in the late 1970s with the relaxation of Communist controls, in force since 1949. But while an earlier generation of artists-many featured in the Inside Out exhibition (in New York at the Asia Society and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 1998)-was described as post- Mao, the younger generation is clearly post-Tiananmen Square, reflecting the modernization that has taken place since that event in 1989 and the adoption of a market economy in the late ’90s, when galleries began to open and foreigners provided a fledgling collector base.

The world learned about Tiananmen Square instantly through a photograph, headlined “Man Blocks Line of Tanks, Tiananmen Square, Beijing,” taken by AP photographer Jeff Widener. It was transmitted by the protesting students instantly over the Internet, documenting not only the event but also the ways in which technology was already transforming the country. In 1995, with the introduction of digital photography and high-tech printing facilities, a new generation of artists, though trained in traditional painting and sculpture at art academies, immediately embraced photo-based media as the perfect means for expressing the changes taking place around them. “When you speak to artists in China, they say that you can take a photo today and get it developed before tomorrow,” explains Melissa Chiu, curator of contemporary art at the Asia Society. “Photography represents an immediacy that allows them to record the changes going on in China as they are happening.”

Though all of the works discussed here were made in China, they avoid stereotypes of Chinese art-traditional scroll paintings and calligraphy and the Socialist Realism of the cultural revolution. “The biggest mistake that people make when looking at contemporary art from China, is either they look for Western references that are totally irrelevant or they look for very simplistic icons, like Mao,” says Meg Maggio, an American and longtime resident of Beijing, where she is director of the Courtyard Gallery. Maggio notes that the first Chinese contemporary artists to gain recognition in the United States and Europe in the mid-1990s capitalized on this “mistake,” working in the style of Political Pop, a blend of cultural-revolution icons with American Pop art. Though most of these artists are painters, there are a few photographers who continue to mine this vein. The Luo Brothers seamlessly insert Coca-Cola and McDonald’s logos into happy-faced scenes from cultural-revolution posters. And Zhao Bandi, 40, represented by Ethan Cohen Fine Arts in New York, is accompanied by a panda in his digital self-portraits, carrying on humorous dialogues (through cartoon-strip-style bubbles) with this symbol of Chinese kitsch. His photographs sell for $600 to $25,000.

But the University of Chicago’s professor Wu traces the various movements in contemporary photography in China to Beijing East in the early 1990s. This fringe neighborhood on the outskirts of the city was a convergence point for the most experimental artists in China at a time when arrests and government closures of exhibitions were still rampant; it spawned the first wave of art photographers. Rong Rong, who photographed the street life and happenings in this fragile bohemia and showed recently at Chambers Fine Art in New York, is often described as the black-and- white Nan Goldin. He cofounded the first avant-garde photography magazine, New Photo, in 1996 with Liu Zheng, another photographer engaged in capturing China’s transvestites and sick and homeless people, but in a style more akin to August Sander and Diane Arbus.

By contrast, performance artists such as Zhang Huan, 38, Ma Liuming, 34, and Zhu Ming, 31, among the first to gain gallery representation in New York and Europe, used photography to document their events, but those images often superseded the performances themselves. Photographs of Zhang’s works, such as To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond (1997), in which people stood naked in a pond of turquoise blue water, conveyed the quiet revolution taking place in China and became symbols of the avant-garde.

“I think it is impossible not to call it ‘Chinese,’ because that is the cultural context it came from,” says Chiu, “but at the same time, the kind of imagery that is being produced has an international relevance and is speaking about more universal issues.” Indeed, if there is anything unique about the situation of artists working in photography and video in China, it is the fact that they are working in a culture that intentionally separated itself from the modernist photography movements of the 20th century. Under Mao, photography was a propaganda tool, and during the cultural revolution, it could be downright dangerous, especially in family albums. “Chinese traditional history is very well recorded, more than that of any other civilization,” says Maggio, “so for a people who have always had an official record of history to suddenly have that ruptured in the 20th century, well, now everyone is hunting for their own take on history.”

Photography has become a means for reconstructing an erased past-or for underscoring the ways in which it cannot be eradicated. Hai Bo, 41, another Courtyard Gallery artist included in many shows, spent several years tracking down individuals whose anonymous faces he’d found in family photographs from the 1930s. He restaged the pictures with the people in the exact poses of the original snapshots and then exhibited the pairs of images, old and new, as individual artworks with titles such as The Three Sisters or Middle School. (Those now dead or missing are represented by an empty space in the newer grouping, a reminder of the casualties of political upheavals.) Similarly, the couple Shao Yinong and Mu Chen have photographed former Communist Party meeting halls, now reception halls, movie theaters, and senior centers. Again, the juxtaposition of old and new in these not-quite-renovated interiors demonstrates photography’s ability to wait out and to outweigh history.

Other photographers are going back further, to the iconography of Chinese scroll painting and the literati tradition, to find ways to incorporate their 3,000-year-old cultural history into contemporary art. Xiang Liqing, 31, who studied oil painting at the China Academy of Fine Art, has digitally manipulated views of China’s gaudy new apartment buildings into grids that resemble ancient calligraphy in his series Rock Never (2002). His images are priced between $800 and $4,000. On a much grander scale, Wang Qingsong, 37, is staging tableaux involving as many as 30 people, in ways that might be compared with Gregory Crewdson or Jeff Wall.

Wang, who is having his first solo show in the United States at New York’s Salon 94 in May, co-organized by Jeannie Greenberg and the Courtyard Gallery’s Maggio, says, “My works are looking at the changes in China in the last two decades and from before I first came to the U.S., in 1999. I thought these changes meant that China was becoming Westernized. But, then I came to the U.S. I found that so many of these changes were not exactly what the U.S. or other foreign countries are like.” They were something entirely new, he says. “The modernization China is undergoing,” he observes, “is a very backward kind of modernization, such as destroying all the ancient architecture in the cities. In the U.S.,” by contrast, he notes, “there is so much concern about preservation.” Although the photographs, he explains, “let people from outside learn about China, when I create the work, I don’t think how it would be accepted or not outside of China.” While Crewdson and Wall may allude to European history painting, Wang appropriates the elongated format of Chinese narrative paintings. His work Night Revels of Lao Li (2000) imitates the arrangement of figures in a 10th-century Song dynasty painting, Night Revel of Han Xizai by Gu Hongzhong, drawing parallels between the voyeuristic role of the painter in the emperor’s court and Wang’s own position as a successful artist in relationship to the contemporary-art scene in China.

But even as all this art represents a leap forward for China culturally, remnants of the past linger. Despite Mao’s famous adage that “women hold up half the sky,” women are still admitted to art academies at a lower rate than men, and fewer have garnered international attention. One exception is Lin Tianmiao, 42, who originally created installations, like Go? (2001), commissioned by Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art, in which she wrapped once popular but now discarded objects, such as bicycles, in white thread and then placed them in front of photographic murals. Lin has since shifted her attention from issues of industrialization to more personal statements about the body, especially in Plait/Braid, shown at the Guangzhou Biennial in 2002. In this piece the artist, who trained as a textile designer, projects a monumental self-portrait in which her head is shaved, onto a white cloth; from behind, streams of white thread sprout from the fabric, falling to the floor behind the image, an exploration of female identity. In collaboration with her husband, Wang Qingxin, she has also been making videos. Several other women photographers surfacing in international exhibitions are Cao Fei, Liang Yue, and Danwen Xing, whose 2002-3 disCONNEXION series of images of electronic detritus was one of the highlights of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “The American Effect” last year.

Censorship is another lingering concern, though government intervention has subsided since the 1990s. “At this point, in terms of visual art, as long as the artists don’t verbalize the meaning, they can get away with the depictions,” says Segraves. Professor Wu sees the situation as being far more complicated. “When you try to avoid censorship, it may become self-censorship, which is even more dangerous,” he says. “The artists now know the system so well and want to be part of shows that the government is sponsoring or supporting, and they may be becoming less radical.” Government officials still make the rounds before the opening of large exhibitions and biennials, which has a chilling effect. One incident occurred during the 2000 Shanghai Biennial, when a spin-off exhibition titled “Fuck Off” included photographs of performance artist Zhu Yu reportedly eating a dead baby. The work was singled out as a “social evil” by conservative delegates to the 2001 National People’s Congress. But, as Shanghai-born Zhou Tiehai made abundantly clear with his digital portrait of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani weighted to the floor by two lumps of elephant dung (also in “The American Effect”), the threat of censorship is not restricted to China.

As there are no constitutional guarantees for free expression in China, artists, dealers, and curators must feel their way, on a case-by-case basis. When asked if censorship is a concern, Lorenz Helbling of ShanghART Gallery replied, “There has never been a show that I knew for certain would not be closed.” But for most contemporary-art dealers in China working with new-media and photo-based artists, the primary concern is not avoiding censorship but finding buyers. “For several years, even at sophisticated places like Art Basel, we showed Yang Fudong and others-no reaction,” says Helbling. “These works do not shout ‘Chinese,’ so people did not know how to respond.” While many collectors of contemporary photography are adding this work to their collections in anticipation of the upcoming shows, few can match the depth of San Francisco and Vail, Colorado, collectors Kent and Vicki Logan’s holdings in contemporary art from China. Eloisa Haudenschild, president of inSITE in San Diego, the collaborative exhibition program between Mexico and the United States, has also assembled a major trove, specifically concentrating on photo-based works created in the past three years. “These artists are good enough without being too Chinese-y,” she explains. “I stay away from works that are directly political or exploit any kind of exoticism.”

Yet even as these artists gain recognition in the United States and Europe, many New York dealers who worked extensively with Chinese artists in the mid-1990s have concerns. Zhang, like other Chinese artists today – Xu Bing, Cai Guo-Qiang, Chen Zhen – is “independent,” after having had one-shot solo shows with Max Protetch Gallery, Deitch Projects, and Luhring Augustine Gallery. Dealers, both in China and in the West, say they have found that many of these artists are unfamiliar with the gallery system and the politics of “exclusive representation.” Curators confirm that even when they are working through a gallery, the artist often approaches them directly, offering works on the side. Max Protetch, who still works with painters Fang Lijun and Zhang Xiaogang, stressed the importance of avoiding generalizations but noted that it takes a number of years to develop the artists’ trust. “With Chinese artists, I felt that I had to buy the work in order to get them to save it for a show,” he explains. “With artists from Europe or even Mexico, I could take things on consignment with no difficulty. After all, this is a very well known gallery.”

Ethan Cohen explains the current status and the reasons for it: “Ten years ago, people would say that there was only enough room for one or maybe two Chinese artists in the contemporary-art market. Today we are seeing that more and more Chinese artists have become powerful forces in that market. Everyone thought this was going to be a short trend, the way it was with the Russian artists, but an abundance of fresh material keeps coming out.” Cohen sees great talent in China-”their refinement, innovation, and seriousness is simply outstanding,” he says. “The art schools there are so good and so selective that even before the artists enter, many have been recognized as virtuosos. These artists worked very hard, and as they became more exposed to the West, they worked at becoming more sophisticated.”

Recently, Zhu Ming, who is represented by Cohen’s gallery, performed his Bubble Man, naked on the beach at Art Basel Miami. He comments on censorship and body art: “I don’t believe that the government clampdown in the early 1990s had any effect on my work, but I felt it always in my bones. I feel more liberated these days, but my mind has never been free, ever since I went to prison in 1994 for three months. From that moment, I have always been terrified, in my body, in my human core, and I have never done a performance in China without feeling scared that a policeman would come and arrest me.” Photographs of Zhou’s performances sell for $2,000 to $20,000.

He found this, his first performance outside China, liberating. But then Cohen interjects, “I felt like he feels in China, worrying about the police, whether the nudity would be permitted. I was haunted by the shadow of Giuliani, or maybe the mayor of Miami.”

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Barbara Pollack is a contributing editor of ARTnews

Photography became art again in China in the late 1970s and 1980s. Whereas this visual technology was largely reduced to a propaganda tool during the first thirty years of the People’s Republic, it reconnected with individual expression after the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) was over. The April Photographic Society – the first unofficial photo club in post-Cultural Revolution China — emerged in 1978; the exhibition it organized in Beijing the following year, entitled Nature, Society, Human, attracted a huge audience hungry for images outside the official media. The 1980s witnessed a delayed introduction of the major schools and masters of western photography from before World War II. Their techniques as well as social and artistic aspirations influenced a generation of young Chinese photographers, whose first goal, not unexpectedly, was to regain photography’s credibility as a record of real social events and human lives. The result was a sustained “documentary movement” from the 1980s to the early 1990s, which produced many works with a strong political agenda, either exploring the dark side of society – poverty, deprivation, social stratification, and political injustice — or glorifying an idealized, timeless Chinese civilization unspoiled by Communist ideology.

This initial process, which Chinese critics have termed a “Photographic New Wave” (sheying xinchao), lasted about a decade and laid the ground for a new generation of photographers to undertake wide-ranging artistic experiments beyond realism and symbolism. Photography became linked to an ongoing experimental art movement in the early and mid-1990s, employed by avant-garde artists to record performances and staged scenes. Since then, a brand of image-making, often referred to by Chinese artists and critics as “experimental photography” (shiyan sheying), has grown into a broad trend; its continuous, exciting development over the past decade has been characterized by non-stop reinvention, abundant production, multifaceted experimentation, and cross-fertilization with other art forms. While “experimental photographers” find inspiration in performance, installation, and multi-media art, painters, performers, and installation artists routinely employ photography in their work, sometimes even reinventing themselves as full-time photographers. Photography now plays a central role in contemporary Chinese art because of its openness to new visual technology such as digital imaging, and because it most effectively challenges the conventional boundaries between fiction and reality, art and commerce, object and subject, thereby inspiring and permeating various kinds of art experiments in China.

Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography from the Haudenschild Collection, the exhibition that this catalogue documents, showcases some of the most recent developments in this experimental art. Most works on display were created in the past five years, while a considerable number date from 2000-2002. The exhibition thus has an acute focus on contemporaneity in a twofold sense – the contemporaneity of China as a rapidly changing society, and the contemporareity of photography as a constantly self-inventing art form. In terms of subject matter, these images demonstrate the artists’ overwhelming concern with their living environment and their own identity.

A striking aspect of Chinese cities in the 1990s and 2000s has been a never-ending destruction and construction. Old houses are coming down everyday to make room for new hotels and shopping malls. Thousands and thousands of people have been relocated from the inner city to the outskirts; in their place a new “urban generation” has begun to invent a globalized culture for itself. This situation is the context and the content of several works in this exhibition. For example, Weng Fen’s striking photographs of two southern cities, Shenzhen and Haikou show a young girl sitting on a wall and looking out; following her gaze we see a mirage-like cityscape emerging on the horizon. The wall thus separates not only space but also time; and the girl mediates not only “here” and “there” but also “now” and “then,” extending our view to an alluring future (nos. 00-00)). When we turn to Xiang Liqing’s Rock Never, however, we are abruptly brought back to the (intensified) reality of a “post-modern” Chinese city: the six large pictures in this series represent residential high-rises as paradoxical structures, characterized by their uniform, anonymous architectural style on the one hand, and by abundant signs of human activities on the other hand. The simulated repetition of both types of image brings these two aspects of a contemporary Chinese city into sharp conflict.

As Xiang’s pictures imply, the emerging city attracts experimental photographers not only with its buildings but also with its increasingly heterogeneous population. To Chen Shaoxiong, a member of the avant-garde Big Elephant Group in Guangzhou, a heterogeneous city resembles the stage of a plotless tableaux; what unites its characters is the place they share. This notion underlies his series of photographs in this exhibition, which are conceived and constructed like a series of puppet theaters within the real cityscape. Images in each photograph belong to two detached layers: in front of a large panoramic scene are cut-out miniatures — passersby, shoppers, and policemen amidst telephone booths, traffic lights, different kinds of vehicles, trees, and anything one finds along Guangzhou’s streets. These images are crowded in a tight space but do not interact. The mass they form is nevertheless a fragmentary one, without order, narrative, or a visual focus.

Representing urban spaces and population, Chen’s photos are linked with another popular subject in contemporary Chinese photography – images of a new “urban generation,” called dushi yidai in Chinese. Works belonging to this category include Yang Yong’s Cruel Youth Diary, Yang Fudong’s Don’t Worry I Will Be Better and The First Intellectual , Yang Zhengzhong’s Cycle Aerobics, and Zheng Guogu’s A World View Digital Image. Instead of portraying the lives of urban youths realistically, these images deliver constructed visual fictions. Each work consists of multiple frames, which invite us to read them as a narrative unfolding in time. Indeed, such interest in seriality and story-telling may be traced to contemporary Chinese experimental cinema, especially the “urban generation” films of the late 1990s and early 2000s. But the “stories” in the photographs remain non-specific or allegorical. What the artists hope to capture is a certain taste, style, and mood associated with this generation of people, and for this purpose they have created images that are often deliberately trivial and ambiguous. Yang Fudong’s Don’t Worry I Will Be Better, for example, 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. In a different and more comical style, another work of Yang’s in the exhibition, The First Intellectual (no. 00), comments on the vulnerability and insecurity of such yuppies — a byproduct of China’s social and economic reforms.

Images of the “urban generation” are further linked to the self-representations of experimental artists, who often identify with this generation. In fact, a strong interest in representing the self sets experimental photography apart from other branches of contemporary Chinese photography. For example, although documentary photographers also take pictures of people and urban scenes, they approach their subjects as belonging to an external, observed reality. Experimental photographers, on the other hand, find meaning only from their interaction with the surrounding world, and customarily make themselves the center of a photograph, as seen in many works in this exhibition: Hong Hao’s Mr. Hong Usually Waits, Shi Yong’s Tonight Moon and You Cannot Clone it, But You Can Buy It, Zhao Bandi’s Zhao Bandi and Panda, Feng Mengbo’s Shot 0074 Q and Shot 0075 Q, Cao Fei’s Beautiful Dog Brows, and Xu Zhen’s Sewer. Shi Yong represents himself as multiple, mass-produced robots; Zhao Bandi employs the style and format of a public poster for his self-portraits; Feng Mengbo turns himself into an action hero in the fictional world of a computer game; Hong Hao imagines himself as the master of an opulent, western-style mansion; Cao Fei transforms herself into a cat; Xu Zhen constructs an abstract picture with images of his body parts. Taken together, these images, the results of masquerade and self-manipulation, both reflect the crisis in the artists’ self-identity and their urgent quest for individuality in a rapidly commercializing society.

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Wu Hung is the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History at the University of Chicago. He has written extensively on contemporary Chinese art and visual culture and has curated several important exhibitions on Chinese experimental art, including The First Guangzhou Triennial. He is currently collaborating with the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art and the International Center of Photography in New York on the forthcoming exhibition New Photography from China.