Hongkong and Shenzhen

Hongkong is obviously fascinating as a cityscape, especially Pei’s Bank of China building (though unloved by locals due to alleged Feng Shui problems, not least the two antennae that resemble vertical joss-sticks, a symbol for death). But the downside is the seamy world of bars and discotheques – right around the corner from the arts centre tower which houses the Goethe Institute and numerous other institutions – where young women from the Philippines and other parts of East Asia are desparately hoping to find a wealthy local husband.

This year is the tenth anniversary of the handover of Hongkong – someone I spoke to made the Freudian slip of calling it the turnover – to mainland China, and many are understandably still preoccupied with the issues that involves. One local artist I met wore a small flag on his shirt, a common sign signaling the spirit of Hongkong’s independence. The scene is pretty small, and almost a bit obsessed with its self-sufficient local context. One of the most interesting spaces is Para/Site, run by German Tobias Berger (once an assistant to René Block at Fridericianum in Kassel), where preparations were underway for an exhibition called ‘Copyrighted’. Berger’s assistant Christina Li helped Christian Jankowski realise the piece he collaborated on with the Dafen copyist painters, shown at Maccarone in New York earlier this year. A fantastic source of information is Asian Art Archive, a web archive of the eponymous institution’s entire library, a comprehensive source of information on art from Asia fuelled by updates from a network of ‘ambassadors’ that keep track of the local scenes, whether in Delhi or Taipee.

Aside from this, Hongkong’s gallery scene is pretty small, and only few places have had lasting influence, with the possible exception of Hanart TZ (between shows when I visited, but director Johnson Chang has been an important figure since the 1980s). The main problem seems to be that there is not that much interest in art in the city, despite the affluence generated by commerce, and that the Hongkong scene is still hesitant, maybe for understandable reasons regarding the political constraints there, to move into mainland China, despite Ghangzhou and Shenzhen being on their doorstep.

One interesting artist is Hiram To, who was in the Hongkong pavilion across from the Arsenale in Venice this year (one of the pavilions I must admit I missed), showing a piece that picked up on the story of Christian Leigh, the mysterious curator who vanished and resurfaced several times. This was juxtaposed with the story of a famous Boxer War-period (1899-1901) Chinese magician, Ching Ling Foo, who was competing with William Robinson, a Scottish New Yorker who posed as Ling Foo’s rival, Chung Ling Soo. It’s hard to say from the catalogue how the actual show worked but it all sounds quite intriguing. Also at Venice this year were Cutierrez and Portefaix, a French couple who have taught architecture in Hongkong since 1996.

By subway and local train it takes about as long as from the centre of London to Heathrow to travel from Hongkong to Shenzhen. The city is like a fascinating dream and uncanny nightmare rolled into one: imagine LA, but with tower blocks for bungalows. There is a lot of green in between, almost recalling Le Corbusier’s ‘Contemporary City’ plans – albeit in generic mode. Motorways turn out not to be motorways but very wide streets, with pedestrians and bicycles crossing. There is no real city centre, just a huge amorphous sprawl.

I was lucky enough to have Fei Teng as a guide, an artist who lived in Munich for 12 years, studying at the art academy there and organising music events in his studio until he moved to Shenzhen two years ago. He took me to Dafen, the painters’ village across town which has had a lot of recent coverage, and allegedly home to 10,000 copy painters who produce 60% of the world’s counterfeit and commissioned paintings for homes, hotels and offices. What is striking is that what one might expect to be a quasi-makeshift market is actually a well-ordered shopping area catering for tourists, with small buildings and plazas lining pedestrian zones. The shops are filled with the usual suspects of counterfeit paintings: Mona Lisas abound, as do wet-on-wet, Bob Ross-type landscapes, the kind of work that obviously lends itself to being produced en masse and quickly. Other favourites are the mascots for the 2008 Olympics, and – interestingly – many portraits of Alan Greenspan, presumably considered a kind of demi-god in the world of finance. Still popular is Deng Xiaoping, whose economic reform and open-door policy effectively brought Shenzhen on its way as the booming centre of the River Pearl Delta. The paintings portray him as a mild, stately old man in his armchair (a portrayal obviously at odds with Deng’s sanctioning of the army’s 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square). You don’t see much of the painters, many of whom, while still selling in Dafen, have relocated elsewhere where it’s presumably cheaper, save for a few who show off inside the sales booth, allowing the customers to get an impression of their skill. One guy smuggled a few paintings of his own design between his usual decorative scenes, an odd painting of a model on a catwalk, with a chunk of pork instead of a head – not the type of usually pronouncedly pleasant imagery otherwise sold here.

Christian Jankowski’s ‘The China Painters’ project seems spot-on in terms of linking the practice of copy painters to the new museum building erected next to centre of the Dafen district. He asked several of the copyists to paint the type of images that they feel most skilled at onto the empty interior of the new museum space, that is, to envision their work as being installed there. This resulted in Liberty Leading the People, flowers, or fantasy heroes alongside the postmodern architecture.

Dafen Art Museum is supposedly intended to link the copy painter culture (planned to be active in the booths in the lower part of the building) with curated exhibitions in the upper galleries. But when my guide and I entered the building it was completely empty, aside from the cleaners. The museum has no collection and there were no signs announcing future shows (though Fei said that a painting exhibition was due to open a week later). It was designed by Urbanus, a group of three architects (Yan Meng, Xiaodu Liu, and Hui Wang) who have two offices (in Shenzhen and Beijing, each with dozens of staff), and a glimpse of the building can be seen at the end of this animation. It quite cleverly quotes the Dafen building ensemble next to it within its own structure, reminiscent of the way in which box structures are immersed in the circular form of the art museum in Kanazawa, Japan, yet the overall structure – realised in dark grey stone on the façade – appeared more like Koolhaas bric-a-brac contortion meets Libeskind slicing rupture. It’s a huge structure and interesting to navigate, though I doubt that the exhibition spaces’ high ceilings and leaning walls make it easy to show art there.

Next stop was OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, also designed by Urbanus, a Kunsthalle-type space with a show by Wang Luyian (whose work was also showing at Arario Gallery in Beijing – in the November issue of frieze). His massive sculptures of a self-sawing machine and two triangular rulers are another case of ‘size does matter’; I preferred the painstakingly clean paintings of weapons that, upon firing, would shoot both ways, thus killing the one who uses them. OCT is not a private gallery, but co-run by He Xiangning Art Museum, the Shenzhen art museum founded ten years ago, and which we unfortunately didn’t eventually manage to visit in time that day (next time!) – OCT also run a studio programme.

Two of the current residents are Alistair Gentry (an artist and sci-fi writer) and Spanish artist Jesus Palomino (who shows with Helga de Alvear Gallery in Madrid) whose work is focused on filter processes. Palomino also makes large installation often using ‘poor’ materials, close to (but by no means the same as) the likes of Thomas Hirschhorn or Marjetica Potrc. Yang Yong also has a studio in the same complex – he’s the artist whose photographs of young women against the Shenzhen cityscape have been discussed as distinctively capturing the spirit of this ‘new’ kind of China. He’s lately turned to painting: large photorealist canvasses, based on predictable choices of media images from George Bush leaving a helicopter to the coach of the German football team, realized with the help of Dafen’s painters. The market seems to go crazy for these kinds of works, whereas photography is still comparatively modestly priced in China.

Before I got my train back to Hong Kong, I went to the music club that Fei Teng co-runs, a basement bar where everyone from Ji Ha, Mongolian master of the horse-head fiddle, to Napalm Death, has played. Next morning a last glance from my 15th floor window across Victoria Habour to the Kowloon skyline, then back to Berlin. I want to go back next year.

Appendix to Beijing: at 798 district I came across a great CD shop where I got some Chinese underground stuff:

1) a CD box by B6

2) CD by entertainingly silly pop outfit New Pants

3) CD by punk band and self-declared G.G. Allin fans The Top Floor Circus

4) Sonic Youth-ish Carsick Cars

5) electronic improv group Tie Guan Yin Duo

6) Double CD of strange, adventurous folk music from Ghizou in central China, called Miao (odd, long song lines); Miao is an ethnic group of about 9 million with their own language of the same name).