Beijing Celebrates
On the morning after the 60th anniversary celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China of October 1, I overheard a conversation among three volunteers on the street, who belonged to the community of 800,000 uniformed citizens mobilized prior and during the National Holiday to safeguard the city at every street corner. One of them had witnessed the fireworks on the official gala performance of the previous night on Tian’anmen Square and was describing in detail and excitement to the other two the changing of colors and patterns of the fireworks. I witnessed briefly the animated exchanges and was deeply moved by such a simple human gesture of appreciating and sharing the splendor of fireworks out of a situation where human individuals were reduced to faceless performers and executors of repetitive and robotic movements and the feeling of being an insignificant person in the face of the government’s grandiose ambition and claims was more than ever present. Tian’anmen Square and the extended area around it were blocked off for days during the celebration and only the leaders, the performers and the selected few had access to it. Cai Guoqiang was one of the privileged, who were granted exclusive entry into this heavily secured area, as he had an enormous task to fulfill. Following his design and directing of the fireworks display at the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics Games, he was again appointed to design the fireworks for the evening of the 60th National Day celebration, which led to the street conversation mentioned above.
There was no question that Cai’s fireworks display was a rather usual art project, unprecedented in scale, complexity, technical sophistication, the extent of public presence and influence, as well as the number of its audience. Cai’s contribution to the evening’s extravaganza included his usual fare of splendid and awe-inspiring explosions as well as a roster of crowd-pleasing realist configurations, including 60 “birthday candles”, the number of 60, as well as three giant ‘fireworks paintings’ depicting Chinese landscapes against a 90-meter by 25-meter pyrotechnic “curtain” hung by 250-tonne cranes over Tiananmen Square. One of the ‘fireworks paintings’ portrayed the ‘Qinghai-Tibetan’ train, which was more of a symbol for territorial unity than a transportation achievement, and the other an ink wash painting by master Fu Baoshi. Carefully constructed to convey and embody desired political messages and ambitions, these fireworks at the same time provided an enormous amount of visual sensations and satisfactions. Cai’s project of the evening was an aesthetic and artistic triumph yet it remains a question whether the ideological purpose an art project serves should be something to waive against it.
The festive and highly elevated mood trumpeted all over the media around the 60th anniversary celebration was contrasted by the emptiness and quietness of the streets in Beijing. A few bus and subway stops near Tian’anmen Square were closed off as early as one day before Oct 1st and made it difficult for some people to go to work even. Many major hotels, restaurants and public entities along the Chang’an Avenue and in the neighborhood were ordered to close business for a few days. The extensive roadblocks and the armed police force and police cars patrolling and positioned all through the city cast a rather solemn and gloomy atmosphere and made it less desirable to travel within the city. Besides, many people were on leave and away for the extended official eight-day National Holiday. Almost half of the population in Beijing consists of new immigrants or temporary residents from all over the country, many of whom choose to return to their hometowns during long breaks.
In the art circuit, things had also settled down quite a bit following two momentous openings on the previous weekend. On September 26th, Pace Beijing, the Beijing branch of PaceWildenstein from New York, reopened its door after a year of renovation to defy ongoing speculations of its premature demise as a result of the economic crisis. The inaugural exhibition of the gallery Encounters was opened last August, six days before the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games and paired up works by international big shot artists with those of their local counterparts. The lineup of names – including Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Marlene Dumas, Richard Prince, Tim Eitel, Fang Lijun, Qi Zhilong, Takashi Murakami, Wang Guangyi, Zhang Huan, and Zhang Xiaogang, among many others – gave an impression of Pace Beijing as the bastion for showing artists who are mature both artistically and commercially. The 22,000 square feet gallery was closed at the end of the exhibition and went through a exhaustive and expensive reformation involving state-of-art temperature and humidity controlled facilities.
Zhang Xiaogang was a both natural and challenging choice to start a new chapter of the gallery with. Zhang is one of the most sought-after and iconic artists in the Chinese art scene. The curator of the exhibition, Leng Lin, the president of Pace Beijing, has been working tightly with Zhang Xiaogang for many years now. Zhang was one of the artists he represented in his own gallery Beijing Commune, which he established in 2005 and still owns. Leng knows Zhang’s work by heart and has written many essays and curated shows on his work. However, like many artists of his generation, Zhang has, over years, produced very many of his signature paintings based on family portraits, which had granted him generous recognition and market success. While constantly complaining about established artists repeating themselves, people tended to feel less enthusiastic about the possible transformations someone like Zhang would make to his work after seeing too many artists of his generation having failed miserably in that account. The success stories of many Chinese artists have been more coincidental than logical and many operate on intuitive feelings instead of having any methodology or coherent line of thinking. For that matter, people are always ready to write off new works by well-known artists, be it Zhang Xiaogang or any others.
Zhang Xiaogang: The Records took its title from Records of the Great Historian, an ancient documentation of the history of China and its neighboring countries covering more than two thousand years from the Yellow Emperor to Emperor Han Wudi (156 BC–87 BC) by the first major Chinese historian Sima Qian (135 BC–86 BC). The works presented were all recent and shown for the first time, including thirteen stainless steel plates painting and a series of sculptures made of cement and bronze. Zhang’s records were more personal than public. The polished stainless steel paintings still carried some of his most recognizable visual motifs including the half-painted green walls, light bulbs, freely traveling electronic wires, TV sets, trails of tears and bloodlines. These melancholic paintings allowed the viewers to see their own reflections on the small patches of unpainted surfaces but more importantly provided a fitting backdrop to the personal diary of Zhang Xiaogang hand-written across these surfaces. Zhang proved himself to be a great writer, a natural one. He would start with the most unassuming sentence but it hit hard. On the painting of Green Wall – Study Room No. 2, he wrote, ‘I feel tired and empty due to another one of those “parties”.’ His notes of his daily activities, meetings with friends, weather conditions, his diets, regular records of his blood pressure, his emotions and responses, thoughts over another artist’s work or general reflections on art making, rendered the objects he depicted in his paintings or cast in concrete or bronze in small or large sizes, less empty signifiers of a certain point of time or collective memory and more concrete, specific, accessible, and endearing references to this one person’s real life, which is Zhang Xiaogang’s. It’s worthwhile to spend a few hours of an afternoon strolling through this exhibition on one’s own, just to read carefully through the words and take in the reflective and emotional input of the artist.
Zhang Xiaogang’s opening at Pace Beijing on that Saturday was so highkey and attracted so many celebrities, important people in the art world, Mercedes and Audis that it created a traffic jam on the road near the gallery inside the art district. A few streets away in the same compound, Wang Yin’s exhibition in Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, situated in the same compound, wasn’t as star-studded or well-attended as Zhang’s yet equally attractive and significant to the art world. Wang Yin, an artist that many people hadn’t heard of before and whose work wasn’t familiar to many at all, is not to be missed. His paintings were a challenge to both the viewers and China’s modern painting history. Without understanding the development of oil paintings in China, which was exposed to all sorts of external influences from the West and shaped by ideological and political changes inside the country, the audience would find Wang Yin’s paintings inaccessible, if not utterly incomprehensible. This also partly explains why Wang Yin has not yet made it to the radar of the art market or art media despite the inarguable value of his years of practice and thinking. The alternations and mixture of the Soviet painting tradition, the Cultural Revolution painting tradition, Western modern art movements, conventional art academic trainings and powerful official ideological settings, have all left their marks on the modernization of the practice of oil paintings in China in terms of subject matters, training methods, techniques and stylistic preferences. Wang’s paintings made thought-provoking references to and telling revelations of these elements in a myriad of ways, an ongoing exploration of the artist that deserves more critical engagements and discussion.
On the morning after the 60th anniversary celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China of October 1, I overheard a conversation among three volunteers on the street, who belonged to the community of 800,000 uniformed citizens mobilized prior and during the National Holiday to safeguard the city at every street corner. One of them had witnessed the fireworks on the official gala performance of the previous night on Tian’anmen Square and was describing in detail and excitement to the other two the changing of colors and patterns of the fireworks. I witnessed briefly the animated exchanges and was deeply moved by such a simple human gesture of appreciating and sharing the splendor of fireworks out of a situation where human individuals were reduced to faceless performers and executors of repetitive and robotic movements and the feeling of being an insignificant person in the face of the government’s grandiose ambition and claims was more than ever present. Tian’anmen Square and the extended area around it were blocked off for days during the celebration and only the leaders, the performers and the selected few had access to it. Cai Guoqiang was one of the privileged, who were granted exclusive entry into this heavily secured area, as he had an enormous task to fulfill. Following his design and directing of the fireworks display at the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics Games, he was again appointed to design the fireworks for the evening of the 60th National Day celebration, which led to the street conversation mentioned above.
There was no question that Cai’s fireworks display was a rather usual art project, unprecedented in scale, complexity, technical sophistication, the extent of public presence and influence, as well as the number of its audience. Cai’s contribution to the evening’s extravaganza included his usual fare of splendid and awe-inspiring explosions as well as a roster of crowd-pleasing realist configurations, including 60 “birthday candles”, the number of 60, as well as three giant ‘fireworks paintings’ depicting Chinese landscapes against a 90-meter by 25-meter pyrotechnic “curtain” hung by 250-tonne cranes over Tiananmen Square. One of the ‘fireworks paintings’ portrayed the ‘Qinghai-Tibetan’ train, which was more of a symbol for territorial unity than a transportation achievement, and the other an ink wash painting by master Fu Baoshi. Carefully constructed to convey and embody desired political messages and ambitions, these fireworks at the same time provided an enormous amount of visual sensations and satisfactions. Cai’s project of the evening was an aesthetic and artistic triumph yet it remains a question whether the ideological purpose an art project serves should be something to waive against it.
The festive and highly elevated mood trumpeted all over the media around the 60th anniversary celebration was contrasted by the emptiness and quietness of the streets in Beijing. A few bus and subway stops near Tian’anmen Square were closed off as early as one day before Oct 1st and made it difficult for some people to go to work even. Many major hotels, restaurants and public entities along the Chang’an Avenue and in the neighborhood were ordered to close business for a few days. The extensive roadblocks and the armed police force and police cars patrolling and positioned all through the city cast a rather solemn and gloomy atmosphere and made it less desirable to travel within the city. Besides, many people were on leave and away for the extended official eight-day National Holiday. Almost half of the population in Beijing consists of new immigrants or temporary residents from all over the country, many of whom choose to return to their hometowns during long breaks.
In the art circuit, things had also settled down quite a bit following two momentous openings on the previous weekend. On September 26th, Pace Beijing, the Beijing branch of PaceWildenstein from New York, reopened its door after a year of renovation to defy ongoing speculations of its premature demise as a result of the economic crisis. The inaugural exhibition of the gallery Encounters was opened last August, six days before the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games and paired up works by international big shot artists with those of their local counterparts. The lineup of names – including Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Marlene Dumas, Richard Prince, Tim Eitel, Fang Lijun, Qi Zhilong, Takashi Murakami, Wang Guangyi, Zhang Huan, and Zhang Xiaogang, among many others – gave an impression of Pace Beijing as the bastion for showing artists who are mature both artistically and commercially. The 22,000 square feet gallery was closed at the end of the exhibition and went through a exhaustive and expensive reformation involving state-of-art temperature and humidity controlled facilities.
Zhang Xiaogang was a both natural and challenging choice to start a new chapter of the gallery with. Zhang is one of the most sought-after and iconic artists in the Chinese art scene. The curator of the exhibition, Leng Lin, the president of Pace Beijing, has been working tightly with Zhang Xiaogang for many years now. Zhang was one of the artists he represented in his own gallery Beijing Commune, which he established in 2005 and still owns. Leng knows Zhang’s work by heart and has written many essays and curated shows on his work. However, like many artists of his generation, Zhang has, over years, produced very many of his signature paintings based on family portraits, which had granted him generous recognition and market success. While constantly complaining about established artists repeating themselves, people tended to feel less enthusiastic about the possible transformations someone like Zhang would make to his work after seeing too many artists of his generation having failed miserably in that account. The success stories of many Chinese artists have been more coincidental than logical and many operate on intuitive feelings instead of having any methodology or coherent line of thinking. For that matter, people are always ready to write off new works by well-known artists, be it Zhang Xiaogang or any others.
Zhang Xiaogang: The Records took its title from Records of the Great Historian, an ancient documentation of the history of China and its neighboring countries covering more than two thousand years from the Yellow Emperor to Emperor Han Wudi (156 BC–87 BC) by the first major Chinese historian Sima Qian (135 BC–86 BC). The works presented were all recent and shown for the first time, including thirteen stainless steel plates painting and a series of sculptures made of cement and bronze. Zhang’s records were more personal than public. The polished stainless steel paintings still carried some of his most recognizable visual motifs including the half-painted green walls, light bulbs, freely traveling electronic wires, TV sets, trails of tears and bloodlines. These melancholic paintings allowed the viewers to see their own reflections on the small patches of unpainted surfaces but more importantly provided a fitting backdrop to the personal diary of Zhang Xiaogang hand-written across these surfaces. Zhang proved himself to be a great writer, a natural one. He would start with the most unassuming sentence but it hit hard. On the painting of Green Wall – Study Room No. 2, he wrote, ‘I feel tired and empty due to another one of those “parties”.’ His notes of his daily activities, meetings with friends, weather conditions, his diets, regular records of his blood pressure, his emotions and responses, thoughts over another artist’s work or general reflections on art making, rendered the objects he depicted in his paintings or cast in concrete or bronze in small or large sizes, less empty signifiers of a certain point of time or collective memory and more concrete, specific, accessible, and endearing references to this one person’s real life, which is Zhang Xiaogang’s. It’s worthwhile to spend a few hours of an afternoon strolling through this exhibition on one’s own, just to read carefully through the words and take in the reflective and emotional input of the artist.
Zhang Xiaogang’s opening at Pace Beijing on that Saturday was so highkey and attracted so many celebrities, important people in the art world, Mercedes and Audis that it created a traffic jam on the road near the gallery inside the art district. A few streets away in the same compound, Wang Yin’s exhibition in Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, situated in the same compound, wasn’t as star-studded or well-attended as Zhang’s yet equally attractive and significant to the art world. Wang Yin, an artist that many people hadn’t heard of before and whose work wasn’t familiar to many at all, is not to be missed. His paintings were a challenge to both the viewers and China’s modern painting history. Without understanding the development of oil paintings in China, which was exposed to all sorts of external influences from the West and shaped by ideological and political changes inside the country, the audience would find Wang Yin’s paintings inaccessible, if not utterly incomprehensible. This also partly explains why Wang Yin has not yet made it to the radar of the art market or art media despite the inarguable value of his years of practice and thinking. The alternations and mixture of the Soviet painting tradition, the Cultural Revolution painting tradition, Western modern art movements, conventional art academic trainings and powerful official ideological settings, have all left their marks on the modernization of the practice of oil paintings in China in terms of subject matters, training methods, techniques and stylistic preferences. Wang’s paintings made thought-provoking references to and telling revelations of these elements in a myriad of ways, an ongoing exploration of the artist that deserves more critical engagements and discussion.
