Art In China
Schooling the Artists’ Republic of China
By DAVID BARBOZA
BEIJING
ON a recent lazy afternoon Wang Haiyang, a student at China’s top art school, was
quietly packing away some of his new oil paintings in the campus’s printmaking
department. He is 23, and he just had his first major art exhibition at a big Beijing gallery.
Many of his works sold for more than $3,000 each, he said. And he hasn’t even
graduated.
“This is one of my new works,” he said proudly, gesturing toward a sexually provocative
painting of a couple embracing. “I’ll be having another show in Singapore in March.”
For better or for worse — depending on whom you talk to — Beijing’s state-run Central
Academy of Fine Arts has been transformed into a breeding ground for hot young artists
and designers who are quickly snapped up by dealers in Beijing and Shanghai.
The school is so selective that it turns away more than 90 percent of its applicants each
year. Many of its faculty members are millionaires and its alumni include some of
China’s most successful new artists, including Liu Wei, Fang Lijun and Zhang Huan.
And with the booming market for contemporary Chinese art, its students are suddenly so
popular that collectors frequently show up on campus in search of the next art superstar.
At the annual student exhibition the students no longer label their works only with their
name and a title. They leave an e-mail address and cellphone number.
“I can say we have the best students and the best faculty in China,” said Zhu Di, the
school’s admissions director. “And we give students a bright future.”
Yet as the academy reshapes its mission and campus, its flowering relationship with the
art market is stirring unease among those who feel that students should be shielded from
commercial pressures.
“The buyers are also going to the school to look for the next Zhang Xiaogang,” said
Cheng Xindong, a dealer in Beijing, referring to an art star, one of whose paintings sold
for $3.3 million at a Sotheby’s sale in London in February. “And immediately they make
contact with them, even before they graduate from school, saying, ‘I will buy everything
from you.’ ” (A similar phenomenon has been observed in recent years at hot art schools
in New York and Los Angeles.)
“This can be a dangerous thing,” he said. “These young artists need time to develop.”
Yet many counter that the school’s soaring fortunes also result from the Chinese
government’s growing tolerance of experimental art, which was once banned. While
Beijing still censors art that it deems politically offensive, including overtly critical
portrayals of the ruling Communist Party, economic and market reforms have changed
the way the government thinks about art and the way the Central Academy trains young
artists.
In the 1980s the school occupied a modest plot of land near Tiananmen Square in central
Beijing where the faculty rigidly taught Soviet-style Realist art to about 200 students,
many of whom were destined to work for the state. Today the school has a new 33-acre
campus and more than 4,000 students. It offers majors in design and architecture and
abundant courses in digital and video art, and some of its graduates are making millions.
In the old days, Mr. Zhu said, students had a passion for art. “They viewed art as a way of
life,” he said, “and Central Academy was a talent pool. Now, as society has changed,
more and more students view art as a job. Students are more practical.”
The nation’s other leading art schools are undergoing similar makeovers. The China
Academy of Art, which has trained some of the country’s most inventive artists, boasts a
huge new campus in the eastern city of Hangzhou. (It was formerly known as Hangzhou
Academy.) In western China the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, which has a reputation for
training great painters, received more than 64,000 applications this year for just 1,600
openings.
But no school has as much clout as Central Academy, the only arts college directly
supported by the central government in Beijing. And recently, academy administrators
say, the support has been extremely generous.
The school’s new gray-brick campus, 10 miles north of Tiananmen Square, has hip cafes,
attractive dining facilities, spacious classrooms and art studios, and sophisticated
equipment, including high-powered computers and Autodesk video editing systems that
cost as much as $200,000 apiece. The campus also has an impressive new 160,000square-foot museum and art gallery designed by the prominent Japanese architect Arata
Isozaki.
Faculty salaries average just $700 a month, but the pay means little to most of these
teachers, whose canvases might as well be painted in gold. Liu Xiaodong, a Central
Academy graduate who has been on the faculty since 1994, often portrays China’s
disadvantaged, for example people displaced in the Three Gorges Dam area, site of one
of China’s biggest development projects. Yet Mr. Liu is among the country’s wealthiest
artists; a huge Three Gorges painting sold at auction last year for $2.7 million, a record
for a contemporary Chinese artist at the time.
Sui Jianguo, the school’s dean and one of the country’s most acclaimed sculptors, has
seen his works sell at auction for as much as $150,000. And Zhan Wang, a professor and
sculptor, is successful enough to employ more than 40 workers in his studio on the
outskirts of Beijing.
The prestige of teaching at the nation’s most elite arts school remains a major draw for
such artists, particularly at a time when China’s art scene is flourishing. This year the
Central Academy managed to lure back Xu Bing, 53, a past winner of the MacArthur
Foundation’s so-called genius award, from New York, where he had worked for the last
18 years.
“China is the most avant-garde and experimental site in the world,” said Mr. Xu
(pronounced shoe), now the school’s vice president for international relations.
“Everything here is new. There’s so much happening, and I want to be a part of it.”
Mr. Xu’s work was controversial in the 1980s, when China had just begun to open up to
the West, and his return was a bit of a surprise to the Beijing art world. His 1988 mixedmedia installation “A Book From the Sky,” consisting of hand-printed books and ceiling
and wall scrolls, appeared to replicate ancient literary texts but in fact contained fake,
unintelligible characters. Viewed as a clever critique of Chinese government propaganda,
it created a sensation when it went on view at the National Art Museum in Beijing. He
was also a popular teacher at the academy in 1989, when many students were
complaining about government restrictions that prevented them from freely expressing
themselves, in art or speech.
When pro-democracy demonstrations broke out in Tiananmen Square that year, many
students and younger faculty members from Central Academy joined the protests, even
making the plastic-foam-and-papier-mâché sculptures of the “Goddess of Democracy,”
which became a symbol of the student movement.
Mr. Xu said he doesn’t worry about government interference with artists or censorship.
“The old concept about art and government being at odds has changed,” he said. “Now
artists and the government are basically the same. All the artists and the government are
both running with development.”
Many of the changes in the Central Academy’s mission grew out of the efforts to develop
a new campus, which also meant rethinking the school’s mission. Some faculty members
were leery of the move from the old campus, which began more than five years ago with
a relocation to a temporary site.
One professor, Sui Jianguo, made sculptures to protest the move, some of which showed
deformed human figures lying in the rubble of the old campus as it was being
demolished. But now he is happy with the changes at the academy. “The whole education
system had to be done in a new way, which turned out to be better,” he said, referring to
the openness to new ideas and new majors.
Some faculty members privately lament the decline of traditional Chinese painting and
disciplined training in centuries-old mediums. And some complain that today’s art
students are not as inspired or idealistic as those in the 1980s.
But other teachers said that their students, largely born in the ’80s, simply reflect the
changes sweeping China, which have brought more wealth to the country and given it
more of a global consciousness. While the enormous growth of the Central Academy has
opened the way for students without a grounding in traditional mediums, they say, many
are highly skilled nonetheless.
“I think the students are more a mix of the best and the mediocre,” said Yu Hong, a
painter who has taught at the school since the early 1990s. “But there are some students
better at drawing than when I was a student.”
“Their vision is broader,” she said of the students over all. “They’ve experienced much
more.”
Most of the faculty agrees on one major shift: The students seem less interested in
politics and more concerned about their personal struggles and issues of identity, not
unlike artists in the United States and Europe.
For example Wang Haiyang, who will graduate this year, paints canvases depicting
someone who looks very much like himself: short, with large, expressive eyes and what
might be described as a troubled soul. He depicts his character with a physical double, in
sexual poses, in violent acts and in women’s clothing. “They tell my own story, my
mentality,” he said of his works. “The whole process of art is like a process to cure
myself.”
Raw expression is on ample display at the academy. Students, once required to paint the
same figurative portrait again and again, are now encouraged to look deep within
themselves and to be creative. Given that the school is no longer purely about painting
and sculpture, they can find outlets in areas like photography or new-media art. Majors
can eventually lead to career choices like designing video-game characters for big
corporations.
Chi Peng, who graduated in 2005 with a new-media degree, is viewed as a success story.
He broke into the international art market a few years ago, at 25, with a series of
photographs in which his naked image sprinted through the streets of Beijing with blurry
red planes in hot pursuit.
Today he sells his computer-enhanced photographs for as much as $10,000 apiece. A
decade ago Central Academy graduates who were lucky enough to sell a painting shortly
after graduation would have been delighted to earn $100.
Mr. Chi calls himself an “80s boy,” part of a new generation that grew up in a freer, more
consumer-oriented society. “It’s hard to define the 80s generation,” he said. “Our
generation is a little tender but not spoiled.”
As for the pressures of the fast-moving art marketplace, which encourages artists to brand
themselves for big collectors, he acknowledges some ambivalence.
Reflecting on his career ascent, he said: “It’s fast, really fast. I never could have imagined
this, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing for me.”
In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets
Capitalism
By DAVID BARBOZA
SHANGHAI, Jan. 3 — After the peppered beef carpaccio and before the pan-fried sea
bass there were raucous toasts and the clinking of wine glasses in the V.I.P. room of New
Heights, a jazzy restaurant in this city’s most luxurious location, overlooking the Bund.
Wang Guangyi, one of China’s pioneering contemporary artists, was there. So were
Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi and 20 other well-known
Chinese artists and their guests, many of whom had been flown in from Beijing to
celebrate the opening of a solo exhibition of new works by Zeng Hao, another rising star
in China’s bubbly art scene.
“We’ve had opening dinners before,” said the Shanghai artist Zhou Tiehai, sipping
Chilean red wine, “but nothing quite like this until very recently.”
The dinner, held on a recent Saturday night in a restaurant located on the top floor of a
historic building that also houses an Armani store and the Shanghai Gallery of Art, was
symbolic of the soaring fortunes of Chinese contemporary art.
In 2006 Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the world’s biggest auction houses, sold $190 million
worth of Asian contemporary art, most of it Chinese, in a series of record-breaking
auctions in New York, London and Hong Kong. In 2004 the two houses combined sold
$22 million in Asian contemporary art.
A.
The climax came at a Beijing auction in November when a painting by Liu Xiaodong, 43,
sold to a Chinese entrepreneur for $2.7 million, the highest price ever paid for a piece by
a Chinese artist who began working after 1979, when loosened economic restrictions
spurred a resurgence in contemporary art.
That price put Mr. Liu in the company of the few living artists, including Damien Hirst
and Jeff Koons, whose work has sold for $2 million or more at auction.
“This has come out of nowhere,” said Henry Howard-Sneyd, global head of Asian arts at
Sotheby’s, which, like Christie’s, has just started a division focusing on contemporary
Chinese art.
With auction prices soaring, hundreds of new studios, galleries and private art museums
are opening in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Chinese auction houses that once
specialized in traditional ink paintings are now putting contemporary experimental
artworks on the block.
Western galleries, especially in Europe, are rushing to sign up unknown painters; artists a
year out of college are selling photographic works for as much as $10,000 each; wellknown painters have yearlong waiting lists; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
and the Pompidou Center in Paris are considering opening branches in China.
B.
“What is happening in China is what happened in Europe at the beginning of the 20th
century,” said Michael Goedhuis, a collector and art dealer specializing in Asian
contemporary art who has galleries in London and New York. “New ground is being
broken. There’s a revolution under way.”
But the auction frenzy has also sparked debate here about whether sales are artificially
inflating prices and encouraging speculators, rather than real collectors, to enter the art
market.
Auction houses “sell art like people sell cabbage,” said Weng Ling, the director of the
Shanghai Gallery of Art. “They are not educating the public or helping artists develop.
Many of them know nothing about art.”
But the boom in Chinese contemporary art — reinforced by record sales in New York
last year — has also brought greater recognition to a group of experimental artists who
grew up during China’s brutal Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
After the 1989 government crackdown in Tiananmen Square, avant-garde art was often
banned from being shown here because it was deemed hostile or anti-authoritarian.
Through the 1990s many artists struggled to earn a living, considering themselves lucky
to sell a painting for $500.
C.
That has all changed. These days China’s leading avant-garde artists have morphed into
multi-millionaires who show up at exhibitions wearing Gucci and Ferragamo.
Wang Guangyi, best-known for his Great Criticism series of Cultural Revolution-style
paintings emblazoned with the names of popular Western brands, like Coke, Swatch and
Gucci, drives a Jaguar and owns a 10,000-square-foot luxury villa on the outskirts of
Beijing.
Yue Minjun, who makes legions of colorful smiling figures, has a walled-off suburban
Beijing compound with an 8,000-square-foot home and studio. Fang Lijun, a “Cynical
Realist” painter whose work captures artists’ post-Tiananmen disillusionment, owns six
restaurants in Beijing and operates a small hotel in western Yunnan province.
If China’s art scene can be likened to a booming stock market, Zhang Xiaogang, 48, is its
Google. More than any other Chinese artist Mr. Zhang, with his huge paintings depicting
family photographs taken during the Cultural Revolution, has captured the imagination of
international collectors. Prices for his work have skyrocketed at auction over the last two
years.
When his work “Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 120” sold for $979,000 at Sotheby’s
auction in March, many art insiders predicted the market had topped out and prices would
plummet within months.
D.
But in October, the British collector Charles Saatchi bought another of Mr. Zhang’s
pieces at Christie’s in London for $1.5 million. Then in November at Christie’s Hong
Kong auction, Mr. Zhang’s 1993 “Tiananmen Square” sold to a private collector for $2.3
million. According to Artnet.com, which tracks auction prices, 16 of Mr. Zhang’s works
have sold for $500,000 or more during the past two years.
Are such prices justified? Uli Sigg, the former Swiss ambassador to China and perhaps
the largest collector of Chinese contemporary art with more than 1,500 pieces, calls the
market frothy but not finished.
“I don’t see anything at the moment that will stop the rise in prices,” he said. “More and
more people are flocking to the market.”
Mr. Goedhuis insists that this is the beginning of an even bigger boom in Chinese
contemporary art.
“I don’t think there’s a bubble,” he said. “There’s a lot of speculation but no bubble.
That’s the paradox. In China there are only a handful of buyers — 10, 20, 30 — out of a
billion people. You only need another 10 to come in and that will jack up prices.”
He added: “Another astonishing fact is there is not a single museum in the West that has
committed itself to buying Chinese art. It’s just starting to happen. Guggenheim, the Tate
Modern, MoMA, they’re all looking.”
Representatives from those museums, as well as others, have made scouting missions to
China. A growing number of international collectors are looking at Chinese art too.
“After the 2005 Sotheby’s show I just jumped in,” said Didier Hirsch, a French-born
California business executive who has long collected American and European
contemporary art. “People said the next big run-up in prices would be at Sotheby’s in
March so I said, ‘Now or never.’ ” Mr. Hirsch purchased nearly his entire collection —
about 40 works — by phone after doing research on the Internet. He said he went first for
what he called the titans — the original group of post-’79 painters — including Wang
Guangyi and Liu Xiaodong.
Some critics here say the focus on prices has led to a decline in creativity as artists knock
off variations of their best-known work rather than exploring new territory. Some are
even employing teams of workers in assembly-line fashion.
Christopher Phillips, a curator at the International Center of Photography in New York,
has become a regular visitor to China, scouting young artists for the center and other
places. On a recent trip “I went to visit the studio of a well-known Beijing painter,” Mr.
Phillips said. “The artist wasn’t there, but I saw a group of canvases being painted by a
team of young women who seemed to be just in from the countryside. I found it a little
disconcerting.”
There are also complaints that some artists are ignoring international standards by selling
works directly into the auction market, rather than selling first to collectors. And many
experts here say that some gallery officials and artists are sending representatives to the
auctions to bid on their own works to prop up prices, or “protect” the prices of some
rising stars.
But Lorenz Helbling, director of the ShanghART Gallery here, said Chinese artists
continue to produce an impressive array of works, and that talk about the market being
overrun by commercialism is exaggerated.
“Things are much better than they were 10 years ago,” he said. “Back then many artists
were commissioned to simply paint dozens of paintings for a gallery owner, who went
out and sold those works. Now these artists are thinking more deeply about their work
because they’re finally getting the recognition they deserve.”