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| Passion Investments: Art |
China Syndrome
Michelle Tsai
04/01/2007
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Less subtle, however, is the fact that prices on the high end
have tripled in the past 18 months. Collectors gasped when one of Zhang’s works
came within range of the $1 million mark last March. But by the end of 2006, Liu
Xiaodong’s Newly Displaced
Population had fetched $2.7 million—a new
record for the field. In this large-scale panorama of the Three Gorges Dam,
children play with pistols, prostitutes tease teenage boys, and men stand
pensive in front of the dam, an immense wall of concrete-colored water bearing
down on the viewer.
 | LIU XIAODONG'S Newly Displaced Population broke records when it
sold for $2.7 million in 2006. (Photograph courtesy Liu Xiaodong.) |
Christie’s Hong Kong sale of Asian contemporary and Chinese
20th-century art last fall cleared $68 million—a 60 percent increase over a
similar event held last spring. Last year, Sotheby’s began holding Chinese
contemporary art auctions on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, as well as in Hong
Kong.
Disconnected in Dalian
Chinese artists have been making up for lost time since
post-Mao reforms in 1979 first allowed contact with the West. As they consumed
classical and modern Western theories, blending new styles with old traditions
to address their nation’s paradoxes, two movements emerged in reaction to the
idealism of the 1980s and Tiananmen Square.
The latest wave of art asks questions of identity, similar to
the way American artists looked at feminism and civil rights in recent decades,
says Kent Logan, a collector who lives in Vail. "How do individuals locate
themselves in this new China that is moving so rapidly? Everybody’s chasing the
dollar, and there is a lot of disconnection," he says.
Individual experiences, not Mao’s Cultural Revolution, have
been anointed the subject of choice by young artists who are numb from the
nation’s painful collective memory but have no personal connection to that time.
He An, a sculptor and painter in Beijing, has stirred controversy with sexually
graphic work influenced by Japanese manga and pornography. The
thread-wrapped bicycles and teapots of Lin Tianmiao, a female installation
artist, draw as much inspiration from American sculptor Kiki Smith as from the
history of domestic labor in China.
 | LIN TIANMIAO'S thread-wrapped bicycles are inspired by China’s
history of domestic labor. (Photograph courtesy Ethan Cohen Fine Arts.) |
Political pop satirizes socialist propaganda art with humor and
nostalgia, drawing on mass cultural symbols. Wang rose to the top of this field
with his Warhol-influenced oil paintings that juxtapose brand names like
Coca-Cola and Prada with kitschy images of peasants. On the other hand, artists
like Liu, Zhang and Fang, who belong to the school of Cynical Realism, reject
politics for everyday life, expressing detachment and loss of faith in a
changing society.
Until about three years ago, a small community of China
enthusiasts and art mavens based in the U.S. and Europe primarily cultivated
this market. Today, China’s newly wealthy have entered the auction fray, but
they have work to do to match the holdings of longtime collectors. Logan, for
example, owns about 140 contemporary works from 40 artists, thought to be the
largest assemblage in the U.S. Uli Sigg, Switzerland’s former ambassador to
China, is believed to have the world’s biggest such collection, some 1,400 works
acquired since the mid-1990s.
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