telegraph (Filed: 20/12/2004)
Art sales: first stirrings of a sleeping beauty

Will Bennett considers the changing market for Chinese art

The People's Republic of China still pays lip-service to Communism but
it is abandoning Mao Tse-tung's doctrines and embracing capitalism with
breathtaking speed. Nine days ago, it opened its doors to foreign
auction houses for the first time to fulfil its obligations as a member
of the World Trade Organisation.
[image] Reclining Nude by Sanyu (1901-66)

The move ended an extraordinary year for the market in Chinese art. In
Hong Kong in late October and early November, Christie's sold art and
antiques totalling £35 million, doubling its 2003 figures, while
Sotheby's auctions soared to £42 million. An anonymous Asian private
buyer paid a record £515,531 for the 20th-century Chinese artist Sanyu's
Reclining Nude at Christie's in Hong Kong, and the fever reached the US
and Britain. In London, Christie's sold porcelain and enamels from the
Alfred Morrison Collection kept at Fonthill House, Wiltshire, since the
19th century, for a staggering £5.3 million.

But does all this mean that the new rich of mainland China are about to
take the international art market by storm and that Sotheby's and
Christie's will soon be holding sales in Beijing and Shanghai? The
reality, as with most things in this vast, complex nation, is much more
complicated.

Firstly, China's decision to allow overseas auction houses in had more
to do with political pressure from the WTO than with any genuine desire
to allow foreigners to compete with its own fast-growing domestic
auctioneers such as China Guardian in Beijing. However, no work of art
dating from before 1949 is allowed to leave the country and, despite the
growing wealth of mainland Chinese, any foreign auction house would
struggle if forced to depend entirely on domestic bidders.

"I don't think that this represents a substantial opportunity for us,"
says Andy Foster, Christie's international business director for Asia.
The auction house has offices in Beijing and Shanghai to help develop
its client base in mainland China and senior figures from Christie's are
known to have visited the People's Republic recently.

Foster thinks that Christie's could be holding auctions in mainland
China in 10 to 15 years' time, but the restrictions on exporting works
of art are simply too tight to make it viable in the short term.

Sotheby's takes a similar view and says that although it "sees China as
an extraordinary opportunity for future growth", it does not "currently
believe that now is the moment to hold auctions in the People's Republic
of China".

While the spending power of mainland China's new rich has grown rapidly,
their effect on the art market has been overstated. They tend to
concentrate on certain sectors such as later ceramics and works of art
and have so far shown less interest in early pottery, sculpture and bronzes.

Ben Janssens, a London-based dealer in Chinese art, estimates that they
account for less than 10 per cent of the value of works sold annually
and points out that many of those described as Chinese buyers actually
come from Taiwan, Hong Kong or Singapore.

Major London and New York dealers are also among the biggest buyers at
auction and Giuseppe Eskenazi, who has a gallery in Mayfair, spent a
total of £15 million at the recent Chinese sales in Hong Kong, London
and New York. "The participation of the mainland Chinese has been
grossly exaggerated," he says. "It has suited the auction houses to say
this but in fact they were buying much more about a year or 18 months
ago than they are now."

One reason is that China's home-based auction houses are developing
rapidly, and so its citizens find it easier to buy from them and avoid
the complications of bidding in semi-autonomous Hong Kong or overseas.
Another is that many of them speculated in the art market in recent
years and are now selling rather than adding to their collections.

The truth is that China and its new millionaires - estimated to number
235,000 already - will play an important part in the art market, but it
will not be the instant boom that some people have predicted. In true
Maoist style, it will be more of a long march than a quick takeover.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/12/20/basale20.xml

***********************************

Builders trash 500-year-old Chinese palace ruins
(Agencies/Xinhua)
Updated: 2004-11-10 11:32

Builders who unearthed the 500-year-old Ming Dynasty ruins of an
imperial palace in the ancient Chinese capital Nanjing destroyed the
site despite being ordered to stop, state media reported.

China has rich resources of ancient civilization while lags behind at
relics preservation. [AFP/file]

Workers on Sunday unearthed several large marble pillar bases but still
failed to put down tools, officials with the Nanjing Cultural Relics
Bureau were cited as saying by Xinhua news agency.

By the time they had finished, the builders had dug a huge pit 2,000
square metres (21,500 square feet) wide and three to four metres (9.9 to
13.2 feet) deep out of the palace foundations, destroying them.

The remains were believed to be part of the eastern palace of the Ming
Dynasty imperial palace, which was built by Zhu Yuanzhang, the first
emperor of the Ming Dynasty.

They were destroyed by fire when war broke out during the Qing Dynasty
(1644-1911).

Local relics protection officials had rushed to the site to stop the
work after local residents tipped them off, Xinhua news agency said.

Wang Zhigao, a relics protection expert from Nanjing Museum, said he and
his colleagues reached an agreement with the construction team to
temporarily suspend work but the request was then ignored until police
got involved.

The State Administration of Cultural Heritage said the workers faced
prosecution for deliberately damaging cultural relics.

Much of China's cultural heritage has disappeared with many relics
smuggled overseas. Illegal excavations are rampant while the drive for
profit has seen countless ancient sites damaged or destroyed.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-11/10/content_390251.htm

***********************************

Nation's relics threatened as never before
By Wang Shanshan (China Daily)
Updated: 2004-12-21 01:22

Cultural relics in China are under critical threat from smugglers, tomb
raiders and thieves, warned Shan Jixiang, director of the State
Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH), yesterday at a working
conference of officials from cultural heritage administrations around China.

Smuggling and illegal excavations of Chinese relics have peaked since
the 1990s, and the situation is worsening as the market for Chinese art
booms both at home and abroad, said He Shuzhong, director of the law and
policy office at SACH.

Chinese relics illegally excavated, stolen from museum collections or
smuggled used to flow mainly to Europe, Japan and the United States,
said He.

The latest trend is that many drop into the hands of art collectors in
major Chinese cities, the official added.

"Such relics go where the highest prices are offered, but still a larger
part of them have been smuggled abroad,'' He said.

The authorities are having more difficulty than a decade ago preventing
the smuggling of Chinese art since smugglers who took the relics to Hong
Kong first in the early 1990s have now developed more than 100 routes to
get them abroad, said He.

Besides the booming market in Chinese art, messy management by
authorities also leads to rampant smuggling, He said.

SACH received reports of 36 criminal cases concerning the loss of relics
in collections of museums, Buddhist or Taoist temples and at historical
sites this year, said Shan.

And among them only seven have been cracked, he added.

The amended Cultural Heritage Protection Law of China, which took effect
last May, stipulated that all cases concerning the loss of cultural
relics must be reported to the SACH.

"But it often happens that local authorities keep such cases secret and
make no reports, or they simply do not realize their losses,'' said Liu
Qifu, head of the relic security office of the SACH.

"The 36 cases count only for a tiny percentage of those that have
happened in the past year,'' said He.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-12/21/content_401800.htm

****************************

Chicago Tribune, Posted on Thu, Dec. 30, 2004

One culture's junk is another one's treasure
BY MICHAEL KILIAN

NEW YORK - (KRT) - In many parts of America, it was tradition for farmers who plowed up hard objects in their fields to pile the objects on the boundaries as stone walls.

Over the last 20 to 25 years, farmers in China have established a quite different tradition. They'd take the objects they plowed up, put them in FedEx boxes and ship them to art galleries in New York.

"That has been a desperately serious problem since 1980," said James C.Y. Watt, chairman of the Asian art department at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. "From 1980 to 2000, there was a torrent of stuff coming out of China. Farmers can hardly plow a field without coming up with a jade object or something."

Happily, more than enough was retrieved or left behind to permit Watt and the Met to stage the largest exhibition of Chinese art ever lent by museums throughout mainland China.

And it's all been dug up in the last 30 years.

Called "China: Dawn of a Golden Age" and up through Jan. 23, it's unique in more than quantity. The objects seem a departure from what even we the untutored view as traditional Chinese art. It's lively, human, expressive and real. It can be serene, yet also comical. There's an unexpected word to be associated with this: Modernism. Yet everything in the show is more than a thousand years old.

"There is a wonderful naive feeling to the early figures," said Watt, about some of the oldest sculptures on display. "They're very refreshing and familiar to contemporary eyes. They would not have been so attractive for people living in the 18th Century. But after the Modernist movement in the West of the last century, our eyes have become trained to see this. Our sensibilities have been modified to appreciate different things, art in Oceania, Africa. That is what makes its freshness."

As Watt explained, this extraordinary exhibition relates not to a particular Chinese dynasty but to a period between them: A.D. 200-700.

The beginning is marked by the decline of the Han Dynasty, a traditionalist culture of southern China; the end, by the rise of the Tang Dynasty, also southern and traditionalist.

In the intervening centuries, waves of immigrants swept into China from the north, bringing their cultures and adapting to what they found. Adding to the mix was what came into China via the fabled Silk Road, connecting China with the rest of Asia and even influences from Europe.

The more than 300 pieces in this show are of jade, bronze, gold, silver, other metals, stone and wood, and include textiles, drawings on paper and wall paintings. The smallest object is a gold coin. The largest, beyond human scale, is a sculpture described simply as "a fantastic animal."

There are miniature figures arranged in gala procession, a group of happy acrobats, water vessels in the shape of a smiling bear and a hideous frog, magnificent horses, unicorns and camels.

"In the early part of the exhibition, you see wonderful naive sculptures of horses and camels," said Watt. "At the end, you see a camel with a little girl napping on it, sort of asleep. One is naive, the other is sentimental, the end of the line as it were."

The pieces in the show were lent by no fewer than 47 Chinese cultural institutions, coordinated by the central government. Much of the archeology was performed by unwitting farmers and construction workers.

"The early pieces are from rescue digs," Watt said. "Farmers start digging wells and find these terra cotta figures. Work crews laying the foundations of a house come across something. Then they give archeology a limited amount of time to do what we can under the circumstances."

Because of China's rapid economic progress in the 1990s, there's money now to support "planned excavations," he said.

"Many more excavations are the kind that normal archeologists do," Watt continued. "They know what they're looking for. Some of the finest pieces are from targeted sites."

Prosperity also has made it possible to offer farmers and others rewards for turning in artworks they've discovered.

"When China opened up (in the 1970s and 1980s), dealers would go around and ask, `Do you have anything at home?'" he said. "They'd buy a piece of jade for 10 yuan, and then sell it for $10,000."

Others would simply ship their finds to galleries or auctioneers in the U.S. and Europe.

"All the material that's been stored in people's houses has probably already left China," Watt said. "But the government has become much stricter on control and penalizing gravediggers. "

Yes, indeed. At one point, according to the FBI, a Chinese penalty held in reserve for shipping, say, the ancient terra cotta head of a soldier tomb guardian was decapitation for the shipper.

"These are things that are self-correcting," Watt said.

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/living/10529923.htm

****************************

NYT January 1, 2005

Wai-kam Ho, Authority on Chinese Art, Dies at 80
By MARGALIT FOX

ai-kam Ho, an art historian and curator considered one of the world's leading authorities on Chinese art, died on Tuesday in Shanghai. He was 80 and lived in Pittsburgh.

The cause was complications of diabetes, his family said. At the time of his death, Mr. Ho was a guest curator at the Shanghai Museum.

Trained in history and literature in China and in art at Harvard, Mr. Ho was one of the first to apply the tools of traditional Chinese scholarship to the Western study of Chinese painting. He was an expert on Chinese painting as well as on Chinese Buddhist art, which includes painting and sculpture.

In a telephone interview on Thursday, Maxwell K. Hearn, curator of the department of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum, discussed Mr. Ho's influence.

"Professor Wai-kam Ho was one of the great scholars of the field in the depth of his investigations, his command of the literature - the vast literature of not only Chinese art history, but also historical texts, regional gazetteers, collections of poetry, random jottings," he said. "He was famous for his ability to delve both deeply and broadly to tease out information from these historical sources, which weren't always an obvious place to look for information."

Wai-kam Ho was born on March 26, 1924, in the Guangdong Province of China. He received an undergraduate degree from Lingnan University in 1947 and did graduate work with Chen Yinke, considered the pre-eminent historian of modern China.

In 1950 Professor Chen secretly arranged to send Mr. Ho to the United States to study art history; Mr. Ho received a joint master's degree in Chinese history and Asian art from Harvard in 1953. From 1959 to 1983, he was curator of Oriental and Chinese art at the Cleveland Museum; from 1984 to 1994 he was Laurence Sickman Curator of Chinese Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo.

As late as 1950, there was little serious scholarship of Chinese painting in the West. Chinese painting, which focused on landscapes, looked to Western eyes austere, forbidding and not representational enough. Weaned on portraiture, Western art historians found the landscapes almost impossible to interpret.

They were also difficult to date.

"When Wai-kam came to this country, the survival of actual examples of landscape paintings from the 10th and 11th centuries was widely questioned," Mr. Hearn explained. "Many people thought that everything that had survived were actually later copies that dated from the 15th and 16th centuries. There were all these paintings, but there was no way to prove that they were of an early date, so the whole field was in a terrible morass. It was through the work of scholars such as Ho that these paintings became anchored in time."

Mr. Ho was an art historical detective. He once traced a painting in the Cleveland Museum's collection to the 10th-century master Juran by examining an obscure inventory seal in one corner. Mining the historical record, he discovered that the seal was used only from 1083 to 1126 to mark artwork acquired for the Song government's imperial collection.

Mr. Ho's books include "Chinese Art Under the Mongols: The Yuan Dynasty, 1279-1368," with Sherman E. Lee (Cleveland Museum, 1968); and "The Century of Tung Chi-chang, 1555-1636," with Judith G. Smith, (Nelson-Atkins Museum, 1992). Reviewing the 1992 work, The Los Angeles Times called its two volumes "the year's most impressive paperback art books."

Mr. Ho is survived his wife, Wai-Ching; a son, Kevin, of Pittsburgh; a daughter, Dawn Ho Delbanco, an art historian at Columbia University who specializes in Chinese painting; a brother and a sister, both of Hong Kong; and three grandchildren.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/01/arts/design/01ho.html

****************************

3. Januar 2005, 02:13, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Schwierige Renaissance einer hohen Kunst
Die Pekingoper kämpft mit dem Zeitgeist

Das Schicksal der Pekingoper ist so turbulent wie Chinas Geschichte während der letzten zweihundert Jahre. Von der «Kulturrevolution» beinahe zerstört, kämpft diese hohe Kunst um das Überleben in einer Zeit, der die Musse und der ästhetische Sinn, die für ihre Wertschätzung unerlässlich sind, abgehen.

Der erste Schlag der Zimbel, die ersten Falsetttöne des Sängers, und man ist dem Geschehen, das sich während der nächsten Stunden auf der Bühne abspielt, völlig verfallen. Wie China selbst nimmt einen die chinesische Oper gefangen, lässt den Zuschauer alternieren zwischen den feinsten Nuancen eines romantischen Kammerspiels und der handfesten Athletik von Zirkusnummern. Man erinnert sich eines schier endlosen sommerlichen Nachmittags in Chengdu, wo man in einem öffentlichen Park stundenlang mit den lokalen Opernfans sich am Schauspiel ergötzte. Man erinnert sich eines Sonntagabends im traditionsreichen Sunbeam Theatre in Hongkong, wo mit Ovationen die Grossen der kantonesischen Oper gefeiert wurden. Das Publikum bestand praktisch nur aus älteren Frauen, deren Männer offensichtlich die sonntäglichen Pferderennen in Shatin bevorzugt hatten. Man erinnert sich an eine elegante Aufführung der Pekingoper im intimen Theater des Palasts von Prinz Gong in Peking. Aber auch im Alltag begleitet einen die chinesische Oper immer wieder. Im Taxi hört man sie am Radio. Beim abendlichen Spaziergang sieht man kleine Gruppen von Amateuren Opernszenen aufführen.
Kaiserliche Tradition

Unweit der Räumlichkeiten, in der Kaiserin Cixi zum Schaden der überfälligen Erneuerung Chinas ihren an Reformen interessierten Sohn hatte unter Hausarrest halten lassen, befindet sich das elegante Theater des Sommerpalasts. Die «Drachenkaiserin» soll eine grosse Liebhaberin der Pekingoper gewesen sein. Einer ihrer Vorgänger auf dem Thron, der wohl bedeutendste Kaiser der Ch'ing-Dynastie, Qianlong, wird mit der Geburt der Pekingoper in Zusammenhang gebracht. Zu seinem 1790 begangenen achtzigsten Geburtstag waren vier Operntruppen aus der ostchinesischen Provinz Anhui angereist. Diese verbanden ihre eigenen Inszenierungen mit den bereits vor Ort bestehenden Operntraditionen, und aus dem Amalgam erwuchs die Pekingoper, die sich somit auf eine rund zweihundertjährige Tradition berufen kann.

Das Repertoire der klassischen Pekingoper umfasst gemäss dem Akademiker Xu Chengbei, der eine wertvolle Einführung in die Geschichte der Pekingoper geschrieben hat, rund 1300 Stücke, von denen jedoch seit 1950 nur noch einhundert regelmässig zur Aufführung gelangen. Die Themen, die auf die Bühne gebracht werden, decken eine grosse Bandbreite ab. Besonders beliebt waren und sind noch immer die Verwicklungen einer unglücklichen Liebe, wo eine Tochter aus reichem Hause sich in einen aufrechten, aber mausarmen Studiosus verliebt, der schliesslich erfolgreich das harte imperiale Examen zum Eintritt in den Staatsdienst besteht. Stets kommt es zum Happy End, da es für einen veritablen Opernliebhaber nicht einsichtig ist, weshalb ein vergnüglicher Nachmittag in einer tristen Stimmung enden soll. Viele Pekingopern haben ein militärisches Thema, das es erlaubt, die menschlichen Emotionen mit besonderer Dramatik zum Ausdruck zu bringen, und das mit der Lobpreisung von Aufrichtigkeit und Mut auf dem Schlachtfeld auch wichtige moralische Botschaften vermittelt. Die Musik der Pekingoper wurde nicht von Komponisten geschaffen, sie folgt vielmehr populären Melodien und beschränkt sich über lange Strecken auf die rhythmische Begleitung des Geschehens auf der Bühne.

Dieses übertrifft in seiner Vielfalt die in der westlichen Oper übliche Inszenierung. Es beginnt bereits bei der aufwendigen Maskierung. Die kunstvolle Einfärbung der Gesichter lässt auf den Charakter der einzelnen Rollen schliessen. Rot steht für Aufrichtigkeit, Blau für Mut und Arroganz, Weiss für Verschlagenheit. Besonders wichtig ist auch das Spiel der Augen, das in seiner Vielfalt gar die Positionen im klassischen indischen Tanz übertrifft. Faszinierend sind für das Publikum natürlich die artistischen Einlagen, die vom Darsteller von delikaten ritualisierten Bewegungen bis zur martialischen Positur ein gewaltiges Repertoire an zuweilen waghalsigen Einlagen erfordern. Stürmischer Applaus auf offener Szene ist gewiss, wenn eine Kriegsszene besonders lebhaft und kraftvoll gemeistert worden ist.
Absturz in der «Kulturrevolution»

Die Pekingoper lebt von den Kostümen, deren Vielfalt und Glanz von der Kopfbedeckung bis zum Schmuck und zu den kunstvollen Seidentüchern kaum zu übertreffen sind. Darin kommen ebenso uralte imperiale Symbolik wie höfische Opulenz und die Rangordnungen der Feudalzeit zum Ausdruck. Was einst als eine harmlose Entführung des Zuschauers aus der harschen Realität des Alltags gesehen worden war, wurde zur Zeit der «Kulturrevolution» (1966 bis 1976) als übelster Ausdruck eines dekadenten, bourgeoisen China verurteilt. Unter der Federführung von Maos Frau Jiang Qing, die sich insbesondere während der Herrschaft der Viererbande als ruchlose Kulturzarin aufführte, wurde die Pekingoper auf acht Stücke mit revolutionärem Gehalt reduziert. Die imperialen Kostüme wurden über Bord geworfen, die klassischen Rollen der Gelehrten, Höflinge und Kurtisanen durch üble Reaktionäre und Kapitalisten auf der einen und revolutionäre Heroen auf der andern Seite ersetzt. Verschwinden mussten natürlich auch die Symbole und Masken, einzig die Akrobatik blieb, wobei sie zum Klang revolutionärer Musik auf reines Muskelspiel reduziert wurde.

Ganz neu war der Einbezug zeitgenössischer Themen nicht. Bereits nach der Etablierung der Republik 1911 und insbesondere in den kulturell sehr bewegten zwanziger Jahren brachte die Pekingoper Themen auf die Bühne, die nicht mehr im höfischen Rahmen spielten. Man erinnert sich eines vergilbten Bildes des wohl grössten aller Opernstars, Mei Lanfang, in dem er in einer Bühnenszene auftritt, die dem Ambiente eines Theaterstücks von Tschechow entspricht. Die «Kulturrevolution» hat bis heute erkennbare Spuren hinterlassen. Viele grosse Künstler wurden in den Tod oder ins Elend getrieben. Ab und zu trifft man in einem Park einen Sänger, der sich schmerzhaft seiner Jugend erinnert, als es bei strengster Bestrafung auch im privatesten Rahmen verboten war, Arien aus traditionellen Opern zu singen. Bis heute haben sich die Kostümschneider nicht vom Rückschlag der «Kulturrevolution» erholt. Noch gibt es in Peking die «Strasse der Opernkostüme», Xicaoshi-Strasse, an der sich seit der Spätzeit der Ch'ing-Dynastie die Kostümmacher niedergelassen haben. Heute macht das Ganze einen traurigen und heruntergekommenen Eindruck, und das Wissen, das von Generation zu Generation weitergegeben wird, droht auszusterben.
Nostalgie

Gefahr droht aber auch vom Zeitgeist. Fragt man jüngere Bekannte, wann sie das letzte Mal in der Pekingoper waren, so antworten sie mit Erstaunen, dass sie noch nie in ihrem Leben eine Oper besucht hätten. Das sei doch alles verstaubt, etwas für alte Leute, und ohnehin verstehe man das altertümliche Chinesisch, das auf der Bühne gesprochen wird, nicht. Viel lieber kauft man sich für das Geld eine CD mit zeitgenössischer Musik, allenfalls auch mit einigen populären Opernarien. Für eine ganze Oper haben im neuen China offensichtlich nur noch Pensionisten Zeit. Für die Touristen hat man ohnehin die traditionellen Opernstücke auf einen «vertretbaren» Zeitrahmen zurechtgestutzt.

Nostalgie kommt auf, wenn man liest, dass im vergangenen Jahr des 110. Geburtstags von Mei Lanfang (1894 bis 1961) und des 100. Geburtstags von Cheng Yanqiu (1904 bis 1958) gedacht wurde. Beide brillierten in der Darstellung von Frauenrollen. Sie sind Ikonen der Pekingoper, vergleichbar dem Tenor Caruso in der westlichen Oper, und erinnern an eine Epoche, die uns nicht nur wegen der zeitlichen Distanz, sondern vor allem wegen der fundamentalen Änderung des Lebensgefühls unwiderruflich entschwunden ist.

Urs Schoettli
http://www.nzz.ch/2005/01/03/fe/page-article9VZXE.html

****************************

business week online - DECEMBER 27, 2004
2005 INVESTMENT OUTLOOK -- THE BEST PLAYS
Why Collectors Are Crazy For Chinese Art
It's not only dynastic porcelain vases. Art mavens are buying contemporary works as well

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when Jim Eccles was working as an IBM (IBM ) systems engineer, he fell in love with the work of the late Chinese artist Chao Chung Hsiang, who was then living in New York. Now 69 and retired, Eccles still loves the seven colorful paintings, some abstract and others in a more traditional Chinese style, that he bought for $200 to $500 each. But lately he has thought about selling them. Based on recent auction sales, he figures they can fetch $50,000 to $100,000 each.

With the emergence of free-spending, nouveau riche collectors from mainland China, the Chinese art market is at the start of what may be an extended boom. Buyers are snatching up everything from 3,000-year-old bronze vessels to avant-garde paintings by Chinese-born artists living in China and abroad. Ever since more than 50 Asian bidders, many from China, showed up at a seminal September, 2003, sale of Chinese rarities at the Doyle auction house in New York, prices have been surpassing estimates. Some examples: At this fall's Hong Kong sales, a 1947 ink scroll by the painter Fu Baoshi, who died in 1965, sold for $1.1 million, four times as much as Sotheby's (BID ) predicted. On Nov. 17, London dealer Giuseppe Eskenazi, who often buys for European and American collectors, paid a record $5.7 million for an 18-inch early Ming Dynasty dish at a Bonhams & Butterfields auction in San Francisco.

Art collecting was one of the "bourgeois" activities purged in the 1960s and '70s during the Cultural Revolution, but it has flourished under recent economic reforms. Dozens of art auction houses have sprung up in China in recent years, the most prominent of which is China Guardian in Beijing.

Experts expect prices to continue rising as China's wealth grows. "The Chinese don't understand why there's such a big price difference between Western art and the greatest Chinese art," says Henry Howard-Sneyd, Sotheby's Hong Kong-based managing director for China and Southeast Asia. For instance, while a Picasso painting sold this spring for $104 million, works by Zhang Daqian, who lived from 1899 to 1983 and is known as "China's Picasso," usually top out at about $1 million. Chinese collectors figure Zhang's paintings should eventually approach Picasso's level.

Is it too late for smaller collectors to dive in? "Oh, God, no," says David Tang, the Hong Kong entrepreneur and art collector who argues that the rise of the Chinese art market "is just beginning."

Before you make any purchases, there are a few things you should know. It's important to buy through reputable dealers. Fakes and copies are rife, particularly of classic paintings and furniture, and even the experts can be fooled. If you're buying within China, stick to recent works. It's illegal to export paintings and artifacts dating before 1949.

One way of approaching the market, says Theow Tow, New York-based deputy chairman of Christie's Americas, is by "looking for categories where mainland Chinese haven't started buying yet but probably will." For instance, Qing-era (1368-1644) and Ming-era (1644-1911) ceramics have soared, in part because Asian buyers most prize later works connected to the Chinese emperors. But experts say Song Dynasty (960-1269) ceramics remain relative bargains. A small 13th century Song Dynasty bowl went for $2,390 at Christie's in Hong Kong on Sept. 21.

CROUCHING RABBIT
Works in stone and pottery from the Han (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) and Tang (618-907) periods remain comparatively cheap. For example, Eskenazi has a small stone Tang-era sculpture of a crouching rabbit on sale for $23,000. Chinese furniture with imperial connections commands a huge premium: A Qing Dynasty bed made from exotic hardwoods went for $847,500 at a Christie's sale in New York in September. But older softwood pieces with no imperial associations sold for as little as $5,000. Some small collectors specialize in Chinese snuff bottles, which sell for $2,000 on up. Check out Christie's snuff bottle sale in March, 2005, and the selection of London dealer Robert Hall at www.snuffbottle.com.

You can also find bargains in China's far-out contemporary art. Prices for the best known artists, such as 39-year-old Zhang Huan, have soared to $40,000 and up. Zhang, who lives in New York, often uses his own body as a canvas and sells photographs of his work. But many promising artists remain affordable. A top pick of Kent Logan, a retired securities executive in Vail, Colo., who owns 120 contemporary Chinese works, is 30-year-old Zhao Bo of Chongqing, in south-central China's Sichuan province. His jazzy street scenes sell for $700 to $9,000 or so. Julia Colman, co-owner of London's Chinese Contemporary Gallery, which sells Zhao's paintings, also likes painter and photographer Zhang Dali, 41, who documents the social stresses caused by China's modernization. His pieces start at $6,000.

If this art appeals to you, start thumbing through catalogs, visiting galleries, and studying Web sites of galleries and important shows. Dealers with expertise in Chinese art include Eskenazi Ltd. (eskenazi.co.uk) and J.J. Lally in New York for classic ceramics and pottery; Kaikodo in New York (kaikodo.com) and Alisan in Hong Kong (alisan.com.hk) for traditional paintings; and Chinese Contemporary (chinesecontemporary.com) in London, Ethan Cohen Fine Arts in New York (artnet.com/ecohen.html), and the Hanart gallery in Hong Kong (hanart.com) for avant-garde pieces. If you see something you like, don't dally. As Jim Eccles discovered, prices are rising as we speak.

By Thane Peterson
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/dec2004/nf20041228_1463.htm

****************************

Taipei Times, Sunday, Jan 02, 2005,Page 19
A gallery of the good, the bad and the ugly
The year's visual art scene provided moments of enlightenment but left room for improvement
By Susan Kendzulak CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

It's that time of the year: the end of the year when many publications take a fond look and assess the year's achievements and failures. And so, with no further ado, the Taipei Times takes a look at some of the highs and lows in Taiwan's contemporary art for the year 2004.

Glorious epiphanies

1. Who needs curators anyway? Some of the best exhibitions in Taiwan were organized by local artists, which only helped to prove the point that decisions about art should mainly be left up to artists. Yao Jui-chung (???) worked with Beijing-based curator Zhu Qi to bring "Spellbound Aura: Chinese Contemporary Photography" to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Overall the exhibition was vivid and sassy. Wang Jun-jieh's (???) Navigator: Digital Art in the Making at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts brought together European digital artists to dialogue with experimental sound artists from Taiwan. Hsu Su-Chen's (???) curatorial debut City Odysseys: Loosing and Lost at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMFA) juxtaposed the work of artists with two theater groups, to create a provocative discourse about the idea of staging an d presentation.

The Bunker Museum of Contemporary Art in Kinmen. PHOTO: SUSAN KENDZULAK
2. The Bunker Museum of Contemporary Art in Kinmen (formerly known as Quemoy) was also organized by an artist. Cai Guo-Qiang (???) who is well-known for his dynamite performances created a memorable opening of art installed in abandoned bunkers.

A scene from the Taipei Biennal at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. PHOTO: SUSAN KENDZULAK
3. Treasure Hill is one of the great jewels of Taipei City. Near National Taiwan University, this cluster of unassuming ramshackle homes that overlooks the Hsindian River was also home to a very inspiring art residency program.

4. Art can be fun. Artist Huang Shih-chieh's (???) Taipei Artist Village foyer installation consisted of fluorescent tubes of liquid and yapping toys which created an exuberant, exaggerated atmosphere.

5. The debut of artist Peng Hung-Chih's (???) "Little Danny" at the KMFA was a sight to behold. His 4.5m guard dog consisted of 3,000 little dog toys that collectively barked when one entered the room.

6. Artist residencies, both here and abroad were such a boon to the artists who participated in them. At the beginning of the year, there was a British-Taiwan exchange. Programs like these act as a kind of cultural diplomacy.

7. Ava Hsueh's (???) solo painting show Flowing Codes at IT Park Gallery showed that one could make work about digital technology without actually using it.

San Francisco's Asian Art Museum hosted Spaces Within featuring Wu Mali's (???) interactive "Follow the Dreamboat" and Michael Lin's (???) large floral floor paintings.

8. The openings/renovations of some new art spaces such as Taipei MOMA and Taichung's National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts provided fresh perspectives and viewing areas.

9. And let's give a "yo" out to the alternative weekly paper POTs which became more bilingual this year and focuses on local cultural events quite well.

The biggest bombs

1. Do we really need another coffee shop? How do we keep up with the chaotic changes at government-funded cultural venues such as the Taipei Artist Village and Huashan?

2. The Auckland Triennial and Shanghai Biennial included some Taiwanese artists; however, these major exhibitions were rather lackluster, so who cares.

3. Again another digital show, the "Digital Sublime: New Masters of the Universe" at MOCA was heavy on the technology and light on the substance.

4. Nankang Software Park's public art. With a budget of NT$72 million, you'd think the organizers could pay for larger sculptures instead of ending up with something that looks straight out of the Stonehenge scene from This is Spinal Tap.

5. Fiction, Love-Ultra New Vision in Contemporary Art was a well-attended show due to its overwhelming inclusion of cutesy kitsch. However, many works did not fit into the premise of comics and animation.

6. Let's award a couple of bian dang to the catfighting curators of this year's Taipei Biennial. Perhaps to some people, international negative attention is better than no attention at all.

7. The UNESCO group AICA's world congress recently held in Taipei and Kaohsiung showed that western arrogance is still alive and well in the post-modern art world.

8. With the exception of Yuan Goang-ming's (???) Media Cramp, the huge CO4 exhibition showcasing in 7 different venues shows the desperate need for a good curator-training program.

9. The ping-ponging fate of the proposed Guggenheim. It would be great to have a Pritzker-prized architect-designed building in Taiwan.

10. Poor scheduling of international events. With several biennials and international conferences in Asia, coordination would allow foreign visitors to attend more than just one event.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2005/01/02/2003217764

****************************

taz, 5.1.2005
Rückzug in den Bambuswald
Die Ausstellung "Shanghai Modern" in der Münchner Villa Stuck präsentiert chinesische Kunst der Moderne, "Die Chinesen" im Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg junge chinesische Fotografie. Beide zeigen, dass Chinas Kunst schon lang zwischen westlichen und chinesischen Erwartungen hin- und hergerissen ist
VON SUSANNE MESSMER

Man betritt sie, die Ausstellung "Shanghai Modern", die derzeit in Münchens Villa Stuck zu besichtigen ist, und ist erst einmal baff: Kantige und verschrobene Gesichter und grell gezackte Großstadtszenen überall - das sind Techniken und Motive, wie man sie von der westlichen Moderne kennt. Und wie man sie von einer Ausstellung erwartet, die moderne Kunst aus den Jahren 1919 bis 1945 präsentiert, egal woher sie kommt. Dazwischen finden sich aber außerdem ganz andere Bilder: getuschte Landschaften, schwarz auf weiß und hochkant. Das soll modern sein? - fragt man sich verdutzt und ist zwischen die beiden Pole geraten, die bis heute chinesische Kunst zum Knistern bringen: Erneuerung und Internationalität hier, Tradition und Regionalismus dort - und viel Spannung und Wirrwarr dazwischen.

Seit sich die chinesische Kunst der Welt öffnete, ist sie zerrissen zwischen westlicher Wahrnehmung und den Erwartungen des chinesischen Publikums, zwischen der Sehnsucht des Westens nach Exotik oder Dissidenz und dem Bedürfnis Chinas nach einer Kunst, die vor allem dem eigenen Land etwas zu sagen hat - das zeigt die Ausstellung in der Villa Stuck. Eine weitere Ausstellung in Wolfsburg, die derzeit unter dem Titel "Die Chinesen" junge, zeitgenössische Fotografie aus China versammelt, stellt klar: Bis heute hat sich daran nicht viel geändert. Noch immer geht es in Chinas Kunst mehr um Strategien des Umgangs mit ihrer Wahrnehmung durch den Westen und durch China - sei es um Annäherung an diesen Blick, seine Umarmung oder den Versuch, sich ihm zu entziehen - und das stärker als in Ländern, in denen es mehr Publikum und Käufer gibt und weniger Ungleichzeitigkeiten in der Entwicklung der Kunst.

Da sind zum Beispiel die Fotos des 35-jährigen Fotografen Liu Zheng, dem Einzigen in Wolfsburg, der sich zum Fotografen hat ausbilden lassen. Für seine Reihe "The Chinese" aus den Jahren 1997 bis 2003 bat er Prostituierte und Bettler, Transsexuelle, Dichter und andere Außenseiter vor die Kamera. Problemlos könnte man diese sozialdokumentarischen Fotografien für eine chinesische Weiterentwicklung von August Sander oder Diane Arbus halten - und ist hingerissen angesichts dieser harten Kritik an der chinesischen Gesellschaft heute. Gleichzeitig zweifelt man: Stellen diese Randgänger wirklich nur sich selbst dar? Oder produzieren sie sich auch für den Betrachter, für den geschockten chinesischen? Oder sogar für den begeisterten westlichen?

Da sind aber auch die aufwändigen, kostbaren historischen Tableaus eines Wang Qingsong, der 2000 mit teurer Kamera, Komparsen, Masken- und Kostümbildnern die Fotografie "The Night Revel of Lao Li" modellierte: eine komplizierte Nachstellung einer berühmten traditionellen Figurenmalerei, die das Leben eines gescheiterten Gelehrten im 10. Jahrhundert nach unserer Zeitrechnung beschreibt. Man fühlt sich ausgeschlossen. Und gleichzeitig schleicht sich ein: Ist es nicht aufregend, wenn man mal etwas nicht in Beziehung gesetzt bekommt? Geht es hier überhaupt um uns, also hauptsächlich darum, sich dem westlichen Blick zu entziehen? Und verwehren sich Werke wie diese vielleicht inzwischen genauso dem chinesischem Verständnis?

Westliche Kunst wird in China schon seit Jahrhunderten stärker wahrgenommen als chinesische im Westen - seit Beginn des letzten Jahrhunderts aber, als das Kaiserreich abgeschafft war, griffen Ideen der europäischen Moderne mit einer Intensität, die es bis dahin nicht gegeben hatte. Die ersten chinesischen Studenten gingen nach Europa und brachten den Traum von radikalen Veränderungen mit, wollten die chinesische Feudalgesellschaft und das Bildungswesen reformieren, dachten über die Institutionalisierung der Umgangssprache und die Einführung westlicher Formen der Wissenschaft nach. Viele bezweifelten den Nutzen der traditionellen chinesischen Kunst, empfanden sie erstarrt und nichts sagend. Eine der wichtigsten Künstlervereinigungen, die die Ideen des Kubismus, Dadaismus und Surrealismus aufnahm, war die Storm Society. Theoretisch schlossen sie sich der Idee der Malerei der reinen Formen ohne gesellschaftliche Verantwortung an. Praktisch ähnelten die Bilder der beteiligten Künstler wie Guang Liang oder Ni Yide frühen Bildern von Picasso.

Es lohnt, sich durch die Ausstellung "Shanghai Modern" zu kämpfen, die sich arg in der Beschränkung auf Schanghai, auf nur eine der Kunstmetropolen Chinas, verheddert - und sogar durch die ausführlichen, manchmal aber planlosen und wenig aufeinander abgestimmten Katalogtexte. Man wird herausbekommen: Neben Vereinigungen wie der Storm Society kam es auch zu einer nicht weniger interessanten Gegenbewegung. Eine der ersten Ausstellungen chinesischer Malerei in Europa wurde vom bekannten Maler Liu Haisu ausgerichtet, der sich selbst der so genannten Malerei des mittleren Weges zurechnete. Diese verschmolz chinesische und europäische Kunst, arbeitete zum Beispiel gleichzeitig multiperspektivisch wie in der westlichen Moderne und mit starken Konturierungen wie in der traditionellen chinesischen Kunst. Und trotzdem stellte er in seiner Ausstellung in Frankfurt/Main im Jahr 1931 vor allem moderne Literatenmalerei aus: Tuschemalerei, so wie sie von Gelehrten in China schon seit dem 8. Jahrhundert als Hobby kultiviert wird.

Doch so einfach lassen sich die auch in München gezeigten Literatenkünstler wie Pan Tianshou mit seiner Fingermalerei oder Huang Binhong mit seinen breiten, pastosen Pinselstrichen nicht auf bloße Bewahrung reduzieren. Wer weiß, wie sie gemalt hätten, wäre die abendländische Kultur nicht mit solcher Macht in China eingebrochen? Außerdem: Literatenmalerei mag für den westlichen Blick einförmig erscheinen. Ihre Produzenten dagegen fanden, dass sie freier und fortschrittlicher ist als westliche Landschaftsmalerei: Statt mechanisch die äußere Natur abzubilden, zeigt sie den geistigen Inhalt, die Substanz der Objekte - und den persönlichen Geschmack des Malers, meinten sie.

Während moderne Literatenmaler in China so vielleicht weniger um Individualismus in ihren Bildern kämpften, als es für uns den Anschein hat, war es die Neue Holzschnittbewegung um den einflussreichen chinesischen Autor Lu Xun Anfang der Dreißigerjahre, in deren Bildern man zunächst moderne Stilmittel erkennt, die aber vor allem für sozial verantwortungsbewusste Kunst votierte. Ihre wilden, groben Bilder von Arbeitslosen und Kriegsopfern scheinen gegenwärtig, wollten aber zurück zu einem didaktischen Ansatz, zurück zur uralten Rolle der chinesischen Kunst als großen Vermittlerin. In einer Zeit, in der Tschiang Kai-shek und seine nationalistischen Regierung die Macht hatte, nahmen sie bereits den sozialistischen Realismus vorweg, wie ihn Mao Tse-tung ein Jahrzehnt später zur offiziellen Doktrin erklären sollte.

Die Gleichsetzung von traditioneller mit rückwärts gewandter und moderner mit avantgardistischer Kunst in China fällt schon schwer, wenn sie fast ein ganzes Jahrhundert alt ist: Heute aber ist sie ganz unmöglich geworden. Im viel schmaleren Katalog zur viel üppigeren und dennoch transparenteren Wolfsburger Ausstellung "Die Chinesen" erfährt man: Eine Internationalität, wie es sie zu Anfang des Jahrhunderts im Bereich der Malerei gab, gibt es im Bereich der Fotografie heute nicht mehr oder noch nicht. Obwohl seit Beginn der Neunzigerjahre erstmals Künstler mit Fotografie arbeiten, sind sie im eigenen Land weitgehend unbemerkt geblieben. So bleiben viele Künstler in China bis heute der traditionellen Auffassung der Fotografie als mimetischer Maschine treu und verlassen sich lieber auf das Erzählen von Geschichten als auf die Sinnlichkeit ihres Mediums. Und weil Fotografie seit Ausrufung der Volksrepublik 1949 vor allem der Propaganda diente - oder dem kunsthandwerklichen Familienporträt beim Fotografen nebenan -, stehen sie auch dem Schnappschuss, dem Realismus, der Fotografie als Mittel zur Dokumentation, skeptisch gegenüber und erzählen lieber kompliziert komponierte Geschichten aus der Fantasie.

Liu Zheng beispielsweise mit seiner sozialkritischen Reihe "The Chinese" hat in letzter Zeit an einem ganz anderen Projekt gearbeitet: Den "Four Beauties", einer Fotoserie aus dem Jahr 2004, die nach alten Geschichten aus der chinesischen Oper ein vielschichtiges, hoch dramatisches und gleichzeitig wie erstarrtes Geschehen mit Kaiserinnen, Kurtisanen, Würdenträgern und Schwertkämpfern präsentiert - das ist große Erzählung, die sich weitgehend dem westlichen Verständnis verschließt. Yang Fudong zeigt in seiner Videoarbeit "Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Garden" (2003), die sowohl in Wolfsburg als auch in München zu sehen ist, eine Gruppe junger Intellektueller beim kontemplativen Spaziergang durch stilisierte Natur, eine vernebelte Traumlandschaft, wie man sie aus chinesischen Parks kennt. Die Arbeit zeigt melancholische, weltfremde Zwanzig- und Dreißigjährige - aber ebenfalls nach einer Geschichte aus dem 3. Jahrhundert, in der es um Rückzug geht und um die Sehnsucht, nur den individuellen Impulsen folgen zu müssen.

Ebenfalls um die Rolle des Intellektuellen, seine Nichtigkeit angesichts der Größe der Natur, geht es bei einer Serie von Selbstporträts von Hai Bo aus den Jahren 2001-2003. Sie zeigt ihn, wie er unter einem Baum sitzt. Es handelt sich um vier Fotos, die genau an den Tagen der Sonnenwende und der Tag-und-Nacht-Gleiche gemacht wurden - weil sie sich trotz des Wechsels der Jahreszeiten exakt gleichen sollten, dauerte es Jahre, sie herzustellen. Ähnlich wie die Videoarbeit Yang Fudongs zitieren sie in ihrer Genauigkeit die Literatenmalerei. Mag sein, dass auch diese Arbeiten sich weniger um die Sinnlichkeit ihres Mediums kümmern als um Geschichten. Vielleicht hat man es hier aber auch mit einer anderen Art der modernen Kunst zu tun, die nicht nur modern ist, weil sie damit spielt, wie sie wahrgenommen wird. Sie ist auch modern, weil sie an Traditionen anknüpft. Und das ist gerade angesichts der neuesten Veränderungen in China avantgardistischer, als es sich der Westen vorstellen kann.

"The Chinese" bis 9. 1., Katalog 24 €; "Shanghai Modern" bis 16. 1. u. 25. 2.-15. 5. in der Kunsthalle Kiel, Katalog 49,80 €; Liu Zheng: "The Chinese". Steidl, Göttingen 2004, 176 S., 40 €

taz Nr. 7556 vom 5.1.2005, Seite 15, 354 Kommentar SUSANNE MESSMER
http://www.taz.de/pt/2005/01/05/a0258.nf/textdruck

****************************

NYT, January 4, 2005
Arts Project Provokes Hong Kong Uproar
By KEITH BRADSHER

[image] A view of Hong Kong from the site of the proposed cultural district. Developers and the Democratic Party, usually adversaries, oppose the plan.
HONG KONG, Jan. 3 - Imagine a cultural complex several times the size of Lincoln Center sitting on a long peninsula jutting into the heart of one of the world's greatest natural harbors, with four giant museums, four large concert halls and theaters, a school for the arts and more.

That is what the Hong Kong government wants to build. It has already commissioned a design by Norman Foster for an immense canopy of clear plastic over the peninsula and taken bids from developers to build the complex, the West Kowloon Cultural District.

But the project has become the center of a bitter debate in the last few weeks. Artists here are deeply split on the idea, and a street demonstration on Christmas Day drew hundreds of protesters. Since the three main proposals for the district's layout were put on display in a Kowloon hall in mid-December, nearly 50,000 residents have flocked to see them.

International cultural institutions and even world leaders are being drawn into the fray. Hong Kong is Asia's busiest transportation hub and the gateway to China, prompting a free-for-all among major American and European museums that would like to play a role in the complex. President Jacques Chirac of France flew here in October to ask Hong Kong leaders to choose the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris to operate one of the four museums in the district, making it potentially the center's first overseas operation. But the Pompidou Center finds itself in sometimes catty sniping with rival institutions that also want to run museums in the district, notably New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art. Unlike local institutions, an out-of-town museum would already have access to a top-quality permanent collection and would have the connections to borrow important works from other big museums. The Pompidou, for instance, has said it could obtain works from the Louvre.

The Guggenheim's overseas operations, most notably in Bilbao, Spain, but also in Venice and Berlin, have made it the front-runner to operate at least one of the museums here. That has drawn gibes from other museums' leaders.

Senior Pompidou officials told reporters in Paris last month that their center was reluctant to work with any "second-class" operation that turned out overseas museums like a "Coca-Cola factory," remarks that were widely interpreted as a criticism of the Guggenheim. The comments attracted particular attention here because the Pompidou and the Guggenheim are both part of the most elaborate development proposal here, being led by companies controlled by Li Ka-shing, Hong Kong's, and Asia's, wealthiest person.

Pompidou officials have since gone out of their way to emphasize that the Pompidou and the Guggenheim collaborate on many projects, including a planned exhibition later this year of works by David Smith, the American sculptor, that will travel from the Guggenheim to the Pompidou.

"We are not like Pepsi against Coca-Cola," Bruno Maquart, the Pompidou's executive director, said in an interview here. "Basically with the Guggenheim we are partners, we can be friends - we have different views on different subjects."

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has been somewhat more circumspect than the Pompidou, emphasizing a preference for frequent loans to other museums instead of franchised operations overseas. The museum is in discussions with a rival development group here and says that it is prepared to work closely with a locally run museum in the cultural district.

"We can't imagine a museum in New York would know how to run a museum in Hong Kong better than people in Hong Kong," said Terence Riley, the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art.

The Guggenheim has avoided public criticism of its rivals, while complimenting Hong Kong and its residents almost to the point of flattery.

"The cultural history of this part of the world is enormous, and the center of contemporary art is not necessarily in New York," said Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation. He added during a recent visit here that the planned cultural district represents "the most exciting opportunity in the world because of the scale and the location."

But before any major museum has a chance to mount a single sculpture or painting, the government and residents here must actually decide to go ahead with the project. The effort has proved increasingly contentious, involving everything from local financing for the arts to the future of democracy in Hong Kong, which Britain returned to China in 1997.

Donald Tsang, the chief secretary and second-ranking official here after Tung Chee-hwa, the chief executive, has pushed a plan calling for developers to submit bids for construction on the entire, 100-acre site. The winning bidder will build not only the museums and concert halls and cover their operating losses for 30 years - the lure for international museums - but will also be allowed to build and sell condominiums, luxury hotels and shopping malls on the government-owned land between the cultural venues.

The executive branch of the government here has broad discretion over the use of the land. So this plan allows quick action without the involvement of the fractious legislature, where democracy advocates in the opposition hold nearly half the seats. By contrast, selling the land and using the proceeds for cultural activities would require approval by the legislature.

The land for the cultural district was reclaimed a decade ago for a tunnel under the harbor to a new airport but has lain vacant ever since. If some version of the plan does not go ahead soon, nothing may happen for a long time, Mr. Tsang warned in an interview. "It will require a new generation of politicians, a new generation of artists and perhaps a new generation of people to see it in a new light," he said.

Lord Foster's canopy design, included by all three layouts under review now, has been the focus of debate as well. Supporters say that it resembles an immense dragon and will become a symbol of the city to compare with the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Sydney Opera House.

Detractors liken the canopy to the Nike "swoosh" and warn that a humid greenhouse effect may develop underneath, and that overhead panels may blow away in typhoons and become scythes. Leslie E. Robertson, a prominent American structural engineer working on the project, said that experiments in wind tunnels had showed that such problems could be avoided.

The government's plans have particularly divided artists here. Many question whether the project places too much emphasis on property development, and warn that Hong Kong has done little to assemble important museum collections or to invite internationally renowned performance troupes to appear at the site.

"It's good to have a couple nice buildings around, but how is the hardware going to help the life of the people, is it going to go beyond being a tourist spot?" asked William Kong, a producer of the films "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers."

As the project has acquired critics in the cultural community, populist politicians in the legislature here have begun suggesting a different approach. They want to sell the land, worth as much as $6 billion, to developers. The legislature would then direct a small part of the proceeds to cultural programs and the rest to social spending, notably to cancel the government's recent move to cut welfare payments.

The current cultural district plan "is undemocratic and without proper consultation," said James To, a senior lawmaker from the opposition Democratic Party.

In an unusual twist, the government's plan is also opposed by many property developers, the most politically influential segment of the city's business community, who usually are adversaries of the Democratic Party in the legislature.

The developers usually back the Tung administration, whose members are selected by the Beijing officials who also control the fate of the developers' many projects in mainland China. But the government's decision to put the entire peninsula out for tender as a single project meant that only a handful of the wealthiest developers could submit bids last summer. The rest of the developers want the project withdrawn and broken into smaller pieces on which they might compete.

Local politics also loom large. Mr. Tsang and Henry Tang, the financial secretary and third-ranking government official here, are the leading candidates to succeed Mr. Tung as chief executive when his term expires in 2007. Mr. Tsang is a former civil servant sometimes perceived as an ally of the city's leading tycoons, while Mr. Tang comes from a wealthy manufacturing family and has strong ties to many developers and other business executives.

The possibility that the whole idea for a cultural center might be defeated or considerably delayed has made some early skeptics in the arts community more supportive of the plan in recent days. "The more I understand the mechanism of the government, the less and less I feel we have a choice" in moving as quickly as possible without the legislature's involvement, said Kai-yin Lo, a prominent jewelry designer.

Gauging public opinion here is difficult; no reliable polls have been conducted. But on a recent evening, visitors to the cultural district design exhibition were uniformly enthusiastic about the project.

"When I went to Europe, I visited a lot of places, but we don't have much in Hong Kong," said Thomas Fok, a 34-year-old pastor. "We cannot make the issue too political."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/arts/design/04kong.html

****************************

The China Post, 2005/1/4
Chinese fantasies of human prowess set imagination dancing in fight films
By Lewis Segal HOLLYWOOD, Los Angeles Times

Creating fantasies of limitless human prowess, the dreamlike action films that first captured mainstream international attention four years ago with Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" put the art into martial art. Going way beyond the kung fu melodramas that have long been a staple of the Chinese movie world, they emphasized a sense of physical metaphor exactly like what Western choreographers have been pursuing since the dawn of the Romantic Age.

Combat in midair may be the most widely recognized and imitated hallmark of these Chinese films, but the physical impossibilities only start there. In Zhang Yimou's remarkable historical epics "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers" (both released in the United States in 2004), you'll find a swordsman who can run you through with such precision that he misses every vital organ and the wound only looks mortal. There's also an archer who can shoot at men from a long distance -- even while running -- and pierce only their garments (another fake kill), and such perfectly controlled fusillades of arrows, spears and knives that the destruction they cause achieves a formal patterning akin to a classic Asian garden.The formality is no accident. Zhang and his action director/choreographer on both films, Tony Ching Siu-Tung, make the heightened ideal of combat they create inseparable from the techniques of ancient Chinese classical music and calligraphy ("Hero") and Chinese classical dance ("House of Flying Daggers").

Early in the latter film, Ziyi Zhang performs a traditional sleeve dance, manipulating the long skeins of fabric at the end of her arms into liquid, calligraphic swirls. A few moments later, her sleeves become percussive, and her dancing as boldly fantasticated as the film's combat sequences, when co-star Andy Lau throws pebbles or beans against a wall of drums, challenging her to match their trajectories and rhythmic patterns.

As she whirls though the room, flinging sleeves against drums, this dazzling "Echo Game" sequence offers a vision of what a dance musical might be in the hands of Zhang Yimou and Tony Ching Siu-Tung. And even when the film evolves into an extended chase -- or when "Hero" juxtaposes conflicting versions of the same events -- the stylized combat scenes punctuate the narratives like dance numbers in a vintage MGM musical.

Both films explore conflicts between conscience and duty, depend on elaborate deceptions involving the fate of the Chinese nation and incorporate love stories (unexpectedly in "Hero," predictably in "The House of Flying Daggers"). Each also provides a climactic renunciation of violence.The large-scale "Hero" is the more visually poetic of the two -- partly due to its haunting use of color -- though essentially masculine in its narrative focus and conditioned by a justification of what we might call Chinese manifest destiny.

In contrast, "House of Flying Daggers" sets up but never resolves a final confrontation between rebels and government forces, remains comparatively feminine and intimate but ultimately makes as powerful a case as "Hero" for linking human conflict with turbulence in the natural world.Instead of blood, the lethal swordplay in these films generates vortexes of snow, rain, falling leaves, with the whole environment invested in the protagonists' duels to the death. When autumn changes to winter in the midst of a fight between comrades who have turned into rivals, nature itself becomes a kind of pitiless referee and mere midair combat no longer seems the most extreme statement of Chinese martial arts fantasy.

Indeed, these films take us back to a Shakespearean world in which every component of the social fabric and natural order is intricately connected. In such a world, an extraordinary man or woman can be literally a force of nature, and it may take a thousand arrows -- or a flying dagger that magically splits in two -- to end that exceptional life.

That's a major key to these films' hold on our imaginations: seeing incomparably powerful individuals define their destinies and even deliberately throw away their lives at a time when our own futures have become compromised by an eroding economy, reduced employee benefits, growing gridlock and all the other mundane realities that no flying Chinese warrior ever has to face.Moreover, as they skip across the surface of lakes, or spiral into the sky, the exhilarating physical feats executed by those warriors establish new standards and expectations for others to match.

In October, martial arts champion Matt Mullins presented a male sextet titled "Sideswipe" at the American Choreography Awards, adding lots of vertical gymnastic buoyancy to the chop-and-kick virtuosity standard in this kind of showpiece. Mullins didn't use wires, so his cast couldn't actually fly, but his debt to Chinese martial arts spectacles proved unmistakable.

Films and television have long conditioned our sense of human possibilities, starting with the illusion that human beings can dance full-out indefinitely. A show like Twyla Tharp's "Movin' Out" bought into that illusion, just as Mullins' sextet bought into the one popularized by Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou, along with the "Matrix" and "Kill Bill" films.

As our lives contract, our fantasies expand -- and human physicality evolves to meet those fantasies. In the 19th century ballet toe-dancing developed in Europe as a technique to express a belief in a parallel, supernatural plane of existence. And that technique has become the symbol of the art. It's likely that, right now, somebody somewhere is inventing a way of moving that looks like flight to confirm our belief that we're greater than our lives allow and have capabilities that we only dream about.
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/art/detail.asp?ID=56414&GRP=h

****************************

dw, 03.01.2005
Architect of Modern China Turns 70

Meinhard von Gerkan's vision: Luchao Harbor City near Shanghai
[image] Meinhard von Gerkan's vision: Luchao Harbor City near Shanghai

Star architect Meinhard von Gerkan has left his stamp all over Germany, but as he celebrated his 70th birthday on Jan. 3, he was most feted for his work as the architect of modern China.

The birthplace of China's future architectural landmarks is the modest headquarters of Von Gerkan, Marg, and Partners (gmp), overlooking the Elbe River in Hamburg, Germany. In addition to churches and two trade fair centers, the company is working on the ambitious Luchao Harbor City, a seaport for 300,000 inhabitants near Shanghai.

Not long ago, gmp also won the competition to build a "grand theater" in Qingdao, China. Now, they'll be the ones to erect a cultural complex with three auditoriums for 3,300 audience members. And until 2007, the German firm will also be working on another prestige project -- China's new national museum in Beijing.

Hamburg architect Meinhard von Gerkan
"We try to boil every design down to a few core questions, in order to find the most natural answer," said von Gerkan when asked to characterize his company's concept.

This approach isn't only evident in China but also in Germany, von Gerkan's home. Lübeck's congress hall, the new airports in Hamburg and Stuttgart, Berlin's new Lehrter train station and Dresdner Bank office, or the new lecture halls for the Technical University in Chemnitz -- despite plentiful use of steel and glass, Meinhard von Gerkan's buildings never seem cold. His work is a combination of timeless, modern elements and subtle, contemporary concessions.

Lecture halls at the Technical University in Chemnitz; plan for a new football stadium in Munich

Humble beginnings

Von Gerkan was born in the Latvian capital, Riga, but after fleeing the East, grew up as an orphan with a foster family in Hamburg. He first studied law and then physics before switching to architecture.

As students, Von Gerkan and his future partner Volkwin Marg began winning design competitions for other architects. That laid the foundation for the success of their company, gmp. Forty years ago, the pair won the competition to design Berlin's Tegel airport, and since then, they've collected more than 160 top prizes.

Under Marg's direction, the firm completed down-to-earth projects like Hamburg's Hanse-Viertel downtown district, or the Neue Messe trade fair center in Leipzig. In contrast, von Gerkan always pursued the novel. Today, the pair employ around 300 staff at their "idea factory," which has several subsidiaries in addition to the Hamburg headquarters.

Meinhard von Gerkan, Luchao Harbor City

In reality, von Gerkan isn't a "star architect," but rather, he's known for being publicity-shy. Still, he is noticeably proud of gmp's success in China. The new national museum in Beijing will have the dimensions of a giant congress hall -- larger than three football fields.

"We have to have something to set against the adjoining gigantic open space of Tiananmen Square," von Gerkan said. With analogies to historic temple architecture, his plan attempts to meld the old and the new. "For me, it's important that people feel comfortable in a new building and are able to find that bridge to their own culture."

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1447592,00.html

****************************

Thursday, January 6, 2005
Entr'acte: French museums take steps away from home
Alan Riding International Herald Tribune

PARIS For the French, culture is culture and commerce is commerce and the twain should ne'er meet. That at least is the theory. In practice, because culture here requires even more money than the government provides, French museums charge admission fees, operate gift shops and woo corporate sponsors. And now two of them, the Louvre and the Georges Pompidou Center, are going still further: they are preparing to open branches outside Paris.

So are French museums following the international branding route chartered by New York's empire-building Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which not only created the acclaimed Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain in 1997, but also has outposts in Venice, Berlin and Las Vegas and is looking to plant its flag in Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan and Hong Kong?

Yes and no.

The Louvre is to open a $100 million satellite in the northern French city of Lens in 2009 and will occupy a new annex at the High Museum in Atlanta for three years from 2006, but its director, Henri Loyrette, considers Britain's Tate to be a closer parallel than the Guggenheim. The Tate now runs four museums in Britain, but it has no permanent presence abroad.

In contrast, the Pompidou, which will inaugurate a $68 million branch in the northeastern French city of Metz in 2007, is also looking beyond France. It aspires to run a new museum of modern art in Hong Kong, part of a proposed development known as the West Kowloon cultural district. And there, perchance, it finds itself alongside the Guggenheim, which has also signed up with one of three groups bidding for the West Kowloon contract.

So why are Western museums energetically spreading their wings?

Throughout the 19th century, museums displayed art and antiquities from far-off lands to people who did not travel. But today, with tourists representing around half the visitors to leading European museums, the issue is less how to draw crowds than what to do with tens of thousands of art works that never go on display. The opening of outposts, then, eases this problem.

The Tate led the way with a Liverpool branch in 1988, St. Ives in 1993 and Tate Modern in 2000. In 1999, the Nagoya-Boston Museum of Fine Arts opened in Nagoya, Japan, to show works from the Boston collection. And since 2002, Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has run a small gallery at nearby Schiphol airport as a way of drawing attention to its own collection. However, other museums, the Guggenheim among them, see foreign branches as sources of revenue.

The State Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg has been enterprising. In June 2000, it created an exhibition center at the Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino complex in Las Vegas in collaboration with the Guggenheim Foundation. Months later, the Hermitage Rooms in Somerset House in London opened with "The Treasures of Catherine the Great." And last year, a still more ambitious Hermitage on the Amstel followed in Amsterdam.

Good for Hermitage's image, no doubt, and a nice deal too. The museum bore none of the cost of adapting these spaces for its rotating exhibitions - $48 million was spent on renovating two 17th-century buildings in Amsterdam alone - but it nonetheless takes a 15 percent share of entrance fees, money it is channeling toward restoration and conservation of its collection and headquarters in St. Petersburg.

Money is also a variable in the Louvre's agreement with Atlanta's High Museum. Loyrette says he is eager to develop long-term projects with American regional museums "because you can do things in research and education that are not possible with one-shot exhibitions." But thanks to related donations from American corporations and individuals, the Louvre also hopes to cover half the $20 million cost of renovating its 18th-century French furniture gallery.

With Lens, though, the Louvre's main motivation is to share its vast collection, with the plus that the new museum will be built with city, regional and European funds. But Loyrette sees other advantages. "It will be in a place without any important cultural institution," he explained. "Putting it into a new building will alter the Louvre's image. And it offers us a chance to rethink our collection."

These benefits could also apply to the Pompidou's project in Metz. Further, both Paris museums want to add buzz by taking eye-catching contemporary architecture to the provinces. A much-anticipated architectural competition for the Louvre-Lens will be held this year, but work is already underway on the Pompidou-Metz, a striking design by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, France's Jean de Gastines and Philip Gumuchdjian of London.

For this, the precedent was set by Frank Gehry's iconic Guggenheim Bilbao. And cutting-edge architecture remains central to the Guggenheim's strategy. Its planned bay-side museum in Rio de Janeiro is the work of France's Jean Nouvel, while Zaha Hadid has designed the museum proposed for Taichung, Taiwan. In both cases, though, because building costs must be paid locally, problems have arisen, in the courts in Brazil and in the municipal council in Taichung.

More recently, with a view to creating a landmark in Guadalajara, Mexico, the Guggenheim has again invited Nouvel as well as Enrique Norten and Asymptote Architects of New York to present models. For the 100-acre West Kowloon cultural district, however, the Hong Kong government has already chosen Norman Foster's master plan, which includes a "great canopy" to embrace theaters, concert halls and and four museums.

But whether the Guggenheim or the Pompidou - or both - will ever operate any museum is still up in the air. They have joined forces with Dynamic Star International, but two other consortiums are also in the running - and meanwhile, opposition is mounting in Hong Kong to giving a lucrative $5 billion project to a single developer. Indeed, even if Dynamic Star is chosen, it may still come down to a choice between the Guggenheim and the Pompidou.

The Guggenheim can boast greater international experience - it claims to have been approached by 115 cities worldwide - but the Pompidou has the richer modern collection. Both promise to share their temporary exhibitions with Hong Kong and to promote contemporary Chinese art, but here the Pompidou may have the edge because it organized a major China show in Paris last year.

So perhaps politics will have the last word. After all, the very notion of implanting Western museums around the world is also political: in this case, would Hong Kong prefer an American or a French cultural beachhead? On the other hand, if it wants to be truly mischievous, the city might ask the Guggenheim and the Pompidou to run the new museum together. Now that would make for interesting cultural politics.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/05/news/entracte.html

************
Note:
There is an online archive of the [achtung! kunst] newsletter available at:
http://fluktor.de/study/office/newsletter.htm
************

************
How to subscribe/unsubscribe:
http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/edv/maillists.htm
************

____________________

Matthias Arnold M.A.
Digital Resources
Institute of Chinese Studies
University of Heidelberg
Akademiestr. 4-8
69117 Heidelberg
Germany

Phone: ++ 49 - (0) 62 21 - 54 76 75
Fax: ++ 49 - (0) 62 21 - 54 76 39

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de

www.fluktor.de
www.zhaomo.de.vu
www.fluktor.de/study/office/newsletter.htm