The Art Is in the Detail

From his terrace, the world is blue and green — mountains and trees — or almost green. Spring is on the way; the geese are back. One, then two, alight on the river, with more still invisible but close behind. Pavilion living! The only way. With the city somewhere down there, and nature everywhere up here, he watches mist rise. River meets sky.

The calm watcher is the fourth-century scholar-artist Wang Xizhi, father of classical calligraphy and model for living an active life in retreat. He is depicted by the painter Qian Xuan, another connoisseur of reclusion, in a 13th-century handscroll at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The scroll is in “Anatomy of a Masterpiece: How to Read Chinese Paintings,” a spare, studious show that offers, along with many stimulations, a retreat from worldly tumult — the religious fervor, the courtly pomp, the expressive self-promotion — that fills much of the museum.

This exhibition is also a refuge from the hurly-burly of Asia Week in New York, which is now in session and has mushroomed into three weeks this year. Dealers are in town from abroad with special shows; others arrive next week. Two art fairs are returning. Add a passel of events devoted to contemporary Asian art, along with the auctions, and the situation is clear: a marathon stretch of looking, judging, sorting, tsk-tsking and oh-mying, not to mention wheeling and dealing. Naturally, the urge to get away from it all can be strong.

I mean, isn’t part of the point of our Western passion for Asian art to find a serenity that we can’t seem to cook up on our own, a metabolic slow-down, a less-is-more state of grace? One 15th-century Chinese writer recorded such an ideal in a lifestyle wish list that includes: “A nice cottage. A clean table. A clear sky with a beautiful moon. A vase of flowers. No cares of the world.” He was describing the optimum environment for looking at art, but also for living artfully.

“Anatomy of a Masterpiece” has all the elements on his list, and one more: instruction. The curator, Maxwell K. Hearn of the Met’s Asian art department, has given the museum’s lofty Chinese painting and calligraphy galleries the intimacy of a teaching collection, with a limited number of objects accompanied by short labels and photographic enlargements of details. The labels are thematic and ruminative, approaching paintings through ideas rather than dynasties. The photographs are a revelation.

To many visitors Chinese brush-and-ink painting, with its faint images on time-darkened silk, has a generic look; entire galleries register as a soft brown blur. Close and repeated looking slowly reveals those images and brings them to life in a startling way; partly this is a matter of individual vision evolving, sharpening. But photographs speed the process, cutting through obscuring patinas, clarifying what is otherwise hard to see, and in dramatic ways.

I can easily imagine Mr. Hearn’s photo-supplemented show creating converts to Chinese painting; it is museology as consciousness-raising. (Yale University Press is publishing an accompanying book.)

Mr. Hearn has the immense advantage of working with some of the most famous Chinese paintings in existence, and he opens with one of them, “Night-Shining White,” a picture of a spirited horse by Han Gan, who lived in the ninth century during the Tang dynasty. By that point the criteria for a successful painting had been established, and the first was the ability to convey a subject’s vitality, or life-energy.

Han was a master of this, bringing an animal to life with contour lines and calligraphic strokes that look almost joltingly vibrant. And if that dynamism escapes us, the testimony of generations of connoisseurs is there to confirm it: the horse is hedged in by a halo of seals applied by scholars and artists over the centuries. Each is a stamp of approval; together they are a storm of applause.

During the Tang dynasty, figure painting was the prestige genre, and landscape subsidiary. With time this hierarchy was reversed. Landscape became the big picture, figures mere dots to establish scale. And the scale was tremendous: towering mountains, limitless vistas, sourceless rivers, as befitted an image of nature that was an emblem of creation itself, a vision of matter forever consolidating and evaporating .

The uses of that vision varied. In “Summer Mountains,” attributed to the Southern Song painter Qu Ding, the landscape is descriptive, a pileup of painstakingly rendered details, from minute curved bridges to an elaborate temple tucked in a notch. By contrast, in Guo Xi’s water-soaked “Old Trees, Level Distance,” emotion reigns. The landscape looks as shadowed with regret as a Mahler song. Two old men, tiny figures, meet for a parting meal before one begins a journey. Where is he going? Will he return? Or is this a last goodbye? They men are dwarfed by a landscape seen through tears.

Several generations later, in Zhao Mengfu’s “Twin Pines, Level Distance,” something new appears. No more realism; no more romanticism; in a sense, no more painting. Now the landscape image is an extension of writing, a form of embodied thought, an essence of landscapeness, a text to be read. In the contemporary West we have a term for this: conceptual art.

And my guess is that if certain Chinese artists in the Met show could leap the centuries, they would feel at home in the concept-intensive environment of the current Whitney Biennial, with Carol Bove’s towering driftwood sculpture, or Charles Long’s skeins of river debris, or even the text-based art of Dexter Sinister (Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt) snaking down a computer screen.

Not that Chinese painting ever abandons sheer visual punch. Liang Kai’s “Poet Strolling by a Marshy Bank,” with its vision of the natural world gashed open and turned inside out, is a shock to the system no matter how often you see it. So is Zude’s painting of an old man’s face as a fissured topography of rock and earth. And Wu Bin’s depiction of Buddhist saints as a cavalcade of rubber-limbed freaks.

Then there is the peculiar vivacity of calligraphy. If Zhao’s “Twin Pines, Level Distance” is the pictorial equivalent of writing, the show’s great example of his actual script, “Four Anecdotes From the Life of Wang Xizhi,” seems to have an aural dimension, like a dramatic reading. So expressive are the linear twists and turns of the brush, the pressure and weights of ink, the spatial punctuations, that you can practically hear his voice.

No doubt that voice often spoke in isolation. In his later years, Zhao alternated life in the quotidian world, with its markets and politics, with periods of withdrawal. And the passage he copied in calligraphy at the Met is a story from the life of Wang Xizhi, the man with the vista of blue and green, the man who loved geese.

In the story, Wang is visiting a Daoist monk who owns a flock of geese, exceptionally beautiful ones. Sell them to me, Wang begs the monk, who replies that he will not. They argue; they wrangle; they spar. It’s exhausting. At last they swing a deal. The monk says that if Wang, such a famed calligrapher, will copy two chapters of Laozi’s Daoist scripture for him, he will give him the birds. Wang makes the copy, which takes all afternoon. Then the geese are his and he returns home, jubilant.

Home, one assumes, is the high terrace in Qian Xuan’s painting. And there, one likes to imagine, Wang Xizhi set the birds free. The legend is that his calligraphic style, the one that shaped so much later Chinese art, was inspired by watching geese fly, observing the bend of their wings, the curve of their necks as they descended to the river. Such are the benefits of the pavilion life: fresh ideas and a sharpened eye. You can acquire both in the Met’s pacific Chinese painting galleries and carry them to the hubbub that is Asia Week outside.

SOURCE: New York Times

A Cultural Revolution

China's sizzling art market has a new darling: patriotic works that mark the founding of the People's Republic.

Revolution is sweeping China's art world. In recent months, paintings extolling the communist victory of 1949 have emerged as the hottest genre in one of the world's most exuberant art scenes. With an economy growing at some 11 percent a year and a society morphing radically day by day, fascination with the birth of modern China is growing fast. In recent years, international collectors and critics have been much taken by new Chinese pop and avant-garde works featuring such notorious emblems of communism as red stars, Mao Zedong and People's Liberation Army soldiers. But Chinese collectors and serious connoisseurs are now becoming far more interested in slightly older works surrounding the creation of the People's Republic.

Indeed, China's red-hot art market is not cooling, but its prime objects of desire are changing fast. Today's biggest draws are paintings done in the realist style between the 1930s and the 1970s, from the time of the anti-Japanese movement led by the peasant-based Red Army to the period before Deng Xiaoping's liberalizing reforms. And they are fetching record prices. Just a few years ago, Chen Yifei's 1972 "Eulogy of the Yellow River," an elegant and very large work depicting a rifle-bearing Red Army soldier on a mountain bathed in golden light, was considered dowdy and kitsch. But at auction in May, after a fierce fight among various bidders, the 297cm-by-143cm piece fetched an eye-popping $5.16 million— setting a record as the most expensive oil painting ever sold in China. By contrast, a painting of the Three Gorges dam site by fortysomething artist Liu Xiaodong set the record for contemporary avant-garde art at $2.7 million last November. "Patriotic art is a very important theme in oil paintings," says Liu Gang, director of contemporary art at China Guardian, the influential Beijing auctioneer that handled the "Yellow River" sale. "We will certainly have this kind of work at our autumn auctions. The main attraction of these works is their inspiring subjects, which reveal the artist's love of nation and the people."

While the patriotic paintings merit attention as historical objects, they are primarily beloved for the passions they arouse. With the typical age of buyers starting at about 40, Liu says the works "easily resonate among people who have experienced wars or the Cultural Revolution." They seem to be nostalgic for an idealistic old China. And they've increasingly got money to invest; nouveau riche Chinese have become highly visible at home and abroad buying all kinds of art. Evelyn Lin, Sotheby's contemporary Chinese painting expert in Hong Kong, explains that while the realist style "is not so fresh" to the Western-trained eye, Chinese highly value what it represents. "It is more emotional," she says. "We know the stories." "Put Down Your Whip," for instance, is a 1939 realist ink work by Xu Beihong that portrays a famous actress in a scene from a renowned anti-Japanese play of the same title. Xu, widely regarded as the greatest master of his generation, died in 1953, and surely never imagined that his picture would sell for $9.2 million—as it did in April at Sotheby's in Hong Kong, setting the world record for the sale of a Chinese painting. It was purchased by a non-mainland collector, though Sotheby's won't say who or where.

Technically, the works are quite accomplished. Figures appear lifelike, often cast in romantic light. European and Soviet influences are clearly discernible even when subjects were uniquely Chinese. Indeed, many of the country's biggest names trained abroad. Xu, for example, studied in France at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He and his creative peers in turn helped educate younger artists. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao's system marshaled the best artistic talents in China to serve politics. Many painters took on teaching jobs at state art institutes and lent their skills to glorifying communism, often in the form of propaganda material.

But little of it still exists as original paintings. Throughout China's history, artists and their works suffered during wars and political campaigns. In the case of modernist ink painter Lin Fengmian, soldiers ransacked his house and destroyed his works during the war with Japan in the 1930s. Then in 1966, just as the Cultural Revolution was beginning, Lin destroyed all his paintings—done on rice paper—by soaking them in water and flushing them down the toilet in an effort to avoid persecution as an intellectual; later he was jailed and tortured anyway. Surviving art from that period tends to be in notoriously poor condition, further heightening demand for the precious few that are well preserved—and jacking up prices.

The art world will be watching closely this fall, when Sotheby's Hong Kong offers two unabashedly patriotic paintings as highlights of its October auction. Xu's 1935 "Crouching Lion" uses his signature animal symbolism to convey his belief in the Chinese nation's grand destiny over foreign powers; Sotheby's predicts the painting will fetch between $230,000 and $320,000. And "Father and Daughter," a 1939 work by Jiang Zhaohe that conveys the optimism of China's youth on the eve of the country's revolution, is estimated to go for somewhere between $10,250 and $15,400.

Though Sotheby's won't say when it expects the current records for patriotic art to be broken, collectors and critics outside China are clearly catching on to the trend. Catherine Kwai, managing director of Hong Kong's Kwai Fung Art Consultants, says some of her multinational investment-bank clients have begun asking her to look out for patriotic pieces to add to their corporate collections. In addition, she is in the process of helping an Italian museum stage an exhibit next year on Chinese realist masterpieces, which will include patriotism-themed paintings. She believes these kinds of paintings are among the most exciting for Chinese art collectors right now. "Behind these paintings there is so much to tell about the history of China," she says.

The fact that the works are straightforward and easy to understand only adds to their appeal. "Chinese still look at paintings for technique," says Kwai. "How lifelike is it? That is our training." As the mainland economy continues to prosper, novice collectors will keep rushing into the market, ensuring a bright future for the realist style. "This market will always be around," says Sotheby's Lin. "This will stay forever in China." That might be a particularly rosy prediction as tastes continue to evolve, but for now at least, patriotic art is enjoying its moment under the red, red sun.

SOURCE: Newsweek International

Works that mark the founding of the People’s Republic

Indeed, China’s red-hot art market is not cooling, but its prime objects of desire are changing fast. Today’s biggest draws are paintings done in the realist style between the 1930s and the 1970s, from the time of the anti-Japanese movement led by the peasant-based Red Army to the period before Deng Xiaoping’s liberalizing reforms. And they are fetching record prices. Just a few years ago, Chen Yifei’s 1972 “Eulogy of the Yellow River,” an elegant and very large work depicting a rifle-bearing Red Army soldier on a mountain bathed in golden light, was considered dowdy and kitsch. But at auction in May, after a fierce fight among various bidders, the 297cm-by-143cm piece fetched an eye-popping $5.16 million—setting a record as the most expensive oil painting ever sold in China. By contrast, a painting of the Three Gorges dam site by fortysomething artist Liu Xiaodong set the record for contemporary avant-garde art at $2.7 million last November. “Patriotic art is a very important theme in oil paintings,” says Liu Gang, director of contemporary art at China Guardian, the influential Beijing auctioneer that handled the “Yellow River” sale. “We will certainly have this kind of work at our autumn auctions. The main attraction of these works is their inspiring subjects, which reveal the artist’s love of nation and the people.”

While the patriotic paintings merit attention as historical objects, they are primarily beloved for the passions they arouse. With the typical age of buyers starting at about 40, Liu says the works “easily resonate among people who have experienced wars or the Cultural Revolution.” They seem to be nostalgic for an idealistic old China. And they’ve increasingly got money to invest; nouveau riche Chinese have become highly visible at home and abroad buying all kinds of art. Evelyn Lin, Sotheby’s contemporary Chinese painting expert in Hong Kong, explains that while the realist style “is not so fresh” to the Western-trained eye, Chinese highly value what it represents. “It is more emotional,” she says. “We know the stories.” “Put Down Your Whip,” for instance, is a 1939 realist ink work by Xu Beihong that portrays a famous actress in a scene from a renowned anti-Japanese play of the same title. Xu, widely regarded as the greatest master of his generation, died in 1953, and surely never imagined that his picture would sell for $9.2 million—as it did in April at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong, setting the world record for the sale of a Chinese painting. It was purchased by a non-mainland collector, though Sotheby’s won’t say who or where.

Technically, the works are quite accomplished. Figures appear lifelike, often cast in romantic light. European and Soviet influences are clearly discernible even when subjects were uniquely Chinese. Indeed, many of the country’s biggest names trained abroad. Xu, for example, studied in France at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He and his creative peers in turn helped educate younger artists. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s system marshaled the best artistic talents in China to serve politics. Many painters took on teaching jobs at state art institutes and lent their skills to glorifying communism, often in the form of propaganda material.

In China’s New Revolution, Art Greets Capitalism

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.

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; well-known painters have yearlong waiting lists; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Pompidou Center in Paris are considering opening branches in China.

“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.

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.

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.”

SOURCE: New York Times

China Celebrates the Year of the Art Market

COLLECTORS of contemporary art had a new set of names to learn this year: those of Chinese artists whose careers are soaring in a new and frenzied sector of the market. Much of the art is politically charged, with references to Mao Zedong, Tiananmen Square and, increasingly, globalization and consumer culture. Among the hottest names are Zhang Xiaogang, whose “Bloodline Series” consists of portraits set during the Cultural Revolution; the painter Yue Minjun, whose portraits of Chinese men look very much like himself; and Zhang Huan, a conceptual artist who produces works like “To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond.” (That piece was part of a performance in which Mr. Zhang photographed local workers standing in a pool of water to show how little effect they had on the water.)

These images can be found in galleries, art fairs and auction houses in every one of the world’s art-buying capitals, often fetching several million dollars apiece. Charles Saatchi, the London advertising magnate, collector and gallery owner, has begun snapping up works by Chinese artists, many of which he plans to exhibit in his new gallery, under construction on Kings Road in London.

“In a single year we sold over $60 million worth of Chinese contemporary art, whereas in 2005 we sold only about $15 million,” said Henry Howard-Sneyd, Sotheby’s managing director in Asia and Australia. In April, the auction house devoted a special New York sale to this category that brought $13.2 million. The prices have been climbing steadily ever since.

A November auction at Christie’s, which holds its Chinese contemporary art sales in Hong Kong, brought in $68 million. Yet Christie’s experts in New York and London think it’s a mistake to market these artists in a narrow category. As a result the auction house also sprinkles such works into its general postwar and contemporary art sales. (Sotheby’s holds auctions devoted strictly to Chinese contemporary art in New York and Hong Kong.)

Whether the boom in prices for Chinese art will last is anyone’s guess. “It may feel like the first flush of fashion, but it’s actually a much deeper market,” said Brett Gorvy, one of the heads of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department worldwide. Mr. Howard-Sneyd said the soaring sales totals had more to do with years of underrecognition of these artists rather than inflated bidding.

So it may be an oversimplification to predict that this is a bubble about to burst. “While there has been a rapid internationalization of Chinese contemporary art,” Mr. Howard-Sneyd said, “there’s bound to be a correction, and then prices will simply level off.”

SOURCE: New York Times