IHT, APRIL 23, 2005
Diverse cultures (and sales) at Asian art event
By Souren Melikian

NEW YORK If proof were needed that the art market and the broader
economy do not function under the same rules, it was spectacularly
provided during New York Asia Week, which began on March 28 and lingered
on into April.

China and India may vie with one another as the economic giants of the
future, but in art sales there is no suggestion of parity.

In contrast to the discreet presence of Indian art, Chinese art was to
be seen everywhere in Manhattan.

Leading dealers in Chinese art put on sensational shows across town. In
the Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street, James Lally was offering
Song porcelains from a private collection formed over a period of 20
years by a New England connoisseur. By the show's opening on March 28,
37 of the 56 pieces had already been sold from the catalogue. Among
them, a beautiful Song dish, incised on an ivory ground with ducks
floating between riverside plants, under a transparent glaze, was picked
up by an American collector. The $120,000 price tag was not a problem.

A superb lobed pottery dish of the 11th or 12th century that was painted
in green and ochre, and molded on the ivory slip, by an artist from the
mysterious non-Chinese Liao culture, went just as easily. At $25,000, a
Hong Kong colleague of Lally's must have thought it was too good a
chance to pass up.

The star piece, a $180,000 high-shouldered vase of the "meiping" type,
freely painted with dark brown peony blossoms on the ivory ground, will
stay in the United States. When it closed on April 16, Lally's show was
all but sold out.

At the E&J Frankel Gallery on Madison Avenue, the brown glazed vessels
of Yixing porcelain from a Taiwan collection, with no decoration other
than discreetly incised calligraphy on their mat grainy surface, went
even more quickly. The show remains on view until April 30, but 27 of
the 29 pieces had found homes within a week of the April 1 opening. The
catalogue, covering new ground with its hitherto unpublished pieces,
helped, and so did moderate prices, which ranged up to $32,000.

Together, the two shows sum up the first asset that gives Chinese art a
huge advantage over Indian art. Thousands of beautiful objects are
available and prices are often comparatively accessible.

The abundance in part reflects an active, centuries-long collecting
tradition in both the West and the East. In China, it goes back to the
Song age, when the court and the literati sought with equal zest objects
from the distant past and the then-contemporary pottery.

In Europe, collecting Chinese art was sufficiently established by the
end of the 16th century for the Medici to patronize the production of
the first European blue-and-white porcelain inspired by Far Eastern models.

By the 17th century, blue-and-white faience, loosely interpreting
Chinese shapes and patterns, was being made at Delft in Holland.
Delftware in turn prompted other imitations. In the 1740s and 1750s,
Limehouse, Bow and other English centers produced porcelain painted with
Chinese landscapes and supplied them with pseudo-Chinese marks for good
measure. In France, Chinese lacquer panels were incorporated into
commodes by cabinetmakers working for the court and Chinese wallpaper
was the ultimate in aristocratic interior architecture. This
centuries-old familiarity with Chinese art paved the way for today's
Western collectors.

Indian art was discovered later in the West, not for want of relations
with India, but by virtue of its nature. Hindu India was dominated by
what might be termed temple culture. It had no porcelain to offer, no
small objets d'art to send abroad - the destructive climate of India
spared only a very few early wooden or ivory artifacts. What the climate
did not destroy, men did. The Indian tradition of melting down old
bronzes to recuperate the raw material eliminated most secular bronzes
of any age. The bronze and tinned brass vessels made for princely
banquets at the Muslim courts, the Moguls included, have trickled to the
West in minimal numbers.

The scarcity of secular art from India formed a striking contrast with
Chinese abundance at the Asia Week auctions. On March 31, Christie's
held a sale of "Indian and Southeast Asian Art including Modern and
Contemporary Indian Art" in which Indian works of art were virtually
confined to stone temple sculptures, and these were outnumbered by
statues and bronze figures from Nepal, Tibet, Cambodia, Thailand and
Indonesia. The same was true at Sotheby's on April 1.

Seen from a broader perspective, that scarcity is laudable. India bans
the export of antiquities that are part of its cultural heritage; in
recent years, it has had greater success in implementing the law than
countries like Cambodia or Nepal.

The day may not be far away when it will be impossible to buy or sell
Indian sculptures without documentation to prove its exit from the
country before the 1970 Unesco convention. That scarcity leads to
sky-high prices, but those spending vast amounts now may be unable to
recoup their outlay in the not-too-distant future - to say nothing of
the risk of possible legal action.

Such fears are spreading in the United States. They are beginning to be
reflected in auction results, with Indian art worst affected. At
Christie's, the highest price, $486,400, was paid for a wonderful
11th-century statue from Angkor, Cambodia, and the buyer was European,
and not American, as would probably have been the case a decade ago. At
Sotheby's, the star of the April 1 sale was a seventh-century brass
statue described as hailing from "Gilgit, northwestern India," under the
label "greater Kashmir," although Gilgit is in Pakistan, and not India,
and the catalogue suggested that the statue might have come from a
Tibetan shrine anyway. Here again, the bronze went to a European who
paid a hefty $352,000 - a "world record for a bronze from greater
Kashmir," Sotheby's said.

India scored that week, but not with the art of the past. At Christie's,
sales of Indian modern and contemporary art totaled an unprecedented
$3.7 million, more than double the amount fetched by temple-stone
sculptures and bronzes.

One important factor gives China the advantage in the art market. For
the past two decades, a flow of discoveries has been generating
ever-growing excitement. Some have come about as a result of commercial
digging, banned in principle, but largely tolerated.

Entire new schools of Chinese Buddhist sculptures have come to light. At
Berwald Oriental Art at 5 East 57th Street, the limestone head of the
smiling deity Guanyin, which was carved under the short-lived Zhou
dynasty (557-581), ranks among the world masterpieces of Chinese
sculpture. It was unknown until its publication in the Berwald catalogue.

At New York's International Asian Art Fair, which closed on April 6,
Mehmet Hassan of Bangkok was showing an admirable Buddha that revealed a
new style in sixth-century China. Conor Mahony, president of the Chinese
Porcelain Company, displayed a marvelous pottery flask of a type never
seen before. Molded with monkeys perched amid formalized vegetal motifs,
handled in crisp sculptural style, it probably dates from the seventh
century or late sixth century. The $28,000 piece went to a New York art
lover on opening night.

More recent periods of Chinese art reserve as many surprises. S.
Marchant & Son of London brought to the fair a vase with an off-white
glaze that was slightly lavender, and the seal mark of the Yongzheng
period (1723-1735). Formerly preserved in a Japanese collection, it is
unique of its kind in that color. So is a white brushwasher shaped like
an open peach with the Qianlong seal mark. A Hong Kong buyer carried
away the $45,000 gem, beating to the post the curator of a U.S. museum.

The excitement now goes beyond specialists. A man who was struck by the
movement of two Tang pottery horses on Berwald's stand at the Asian fair
bought the pair after checking that they looked nice in his residence.
An impromptu decision to buy on April 3 was made by a French art lover
visiting Mahony's stand. He could not resist the snarling truculence of
two guardians in painted terracotta from the early eighth century. The
price was $175,000.

The flow of Chinese art coming out of the country has lately slowed. The
Chinese have now stepped into the art market massively, and the flow is
being redirected back home.

When Grace Wu Bruce of Hong Kong started dealing in Chinese furniture in
1987, eventually becoming a world leader in the field, buyers were
mainly Western. She opened a second gallery in London. Now, she is
recentering her activities on Hong Kong. Demand from China has risen
exponentially. Wu Bruce cites as an example a twelve-panel screen in
zitan wood, complete with its period paintings on silk, which she bought
for nearly $3 million at Christie's Hong Kong on July 7, 2003, thus
setting a world auction record for a piece of Chinese furniture. By
December that year, the screen had been bought by a collector from the
mainland.

Collecting art has become an all-China sport and China's lead in the art
market can only accelerate.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/22/news/aachin.php

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

The Videonale 10 takes place from April 29th till May 16th 2005 at the
Kunstmuseum Bonn. The current trends of video art will be presented in
an exhibition filling the large halls of the art museum. Beyond that a
thematically arranged single-channel tape agenda will be shown during
the festival and a symposium explores the possibilities of exhibition
design for video and media art.

http://www.videonale.org/

******

Ma Yongfeng *1971, lebt/lives in Shenzhen
The Swirl
2002, 15:06 min, Ton/sound, Farbe/colour

The Swirl is a work that is as innocuous as it is brutal. In spite of
its compositional simplicity and optical beauty, it is difficult to look
at. The gaze is directed into the open drum of a washing machine that is
loadable from above. In an uncut shot, we observe a 15-minute wash
cycle. However, in the drum there are not brightly colored pieces of
clothing, but six goldfish. The pointlessness of the torment and the
helplessness of the tormented can be read as a metaphor for torture. But
it may also be understood as social criticism and a cynical commentary
upon the artist’s existence, if one takes into consideration that the
fish functions as a symbol for prosperity within Chinese culture. During
the rapid transition from authoritarian communism to untrammeled
capitalism, independence and distance from the mechanisms of the system
continue to be difficult. Artists tell us of this experience, not least
of all fostered by the recent boom of contemporary Chinese art in the
West. (DB/GFT)

*****

Jen Liu *1976, lebt/lives in Amsterdam
2304 Is a Beer Drinking Year
2004, 5:50 min, Ton/sound, Farbe/colour

2304 Is a Beer Drinking Year skilfully plays with the genre of music
video, mixing various media levels. Digital animation is combined with
clips from monumental big-screen epics dedicated to the heroic depiction
of war scenes. This interplay results in a humorous and sarcastic
commentary on the connection between economic interests and martial
activities. »Don’t forget, tax from ten beers pays to make one bullet«,
is the slogan that unites war and advertising campaign. As in the music
video genre, the images in 2304 Is a Beer Drinking Year are to be read
as illustration of and commentary on the song’s music and lyrics. »Ten
thousand beers build a bomb! Come on! Tell 1665 – what it’s about! Tell
803 BC - bullets, pint, a shout! Tell 1665 – what it’s about! Shoot,
shoot, shoot! What it’s about!« are some of the song’s words. Music,
text and pictures create an imaginary war in which cause and effect
blur. Is it a military crusade to propagate beer drinking and guitar
rock, or are we experiencing the vision of a war financed through beer
consumption? The boundaries between advertising and military campaign
are just as fluid as those between earnestness and entertainment. (DB/JTG)

********

Symposium zur Ausstellungsgestaltung
für Video- und Medienkunst

am Sonntag, 8. Mai 2005, 10-18 Uhr
im Auditorium des Kunstmuseums Bonn

Ein interdisziplinäres Forum für Kunsthistoriker, Architekten, Kunst-
und Medientheoretiker, Museumsfachleute und Ausstellungsgestalter

Das Symposium vertieft die im Vorfeld der Videonale aufgeworfenen Fragen
nach einer geeigneten Präsentationsform von Video- und Medienkunst
jenseits der ›Black Boxes‹. In einem interdisziplinären Spektrum werden
Architekten und Ausstellungsgestalter, sowie Kunst- und
Medienwissenschaftler ausgewählte Fallbeispiele vorstellen. Die
Veranstaltung thematisiert das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Museum,
Medientechnik und Medienkunst in der kuratorischen Praxis und befasst
sich mit konkreten Ausstellungsprojekten. In diesem Rahmen wird auch die
Ausstellungsarchitektur von Jochen Specht für die Videonale 10 diskutiert.

http://www.videonale.org/symposiumv10.html

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

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