Pace Beijing's first solo show by a western artist pays off

Pace Gallery's decision to choose Sterling Ruby for their first solo show by a western artist at their Beijing outpost has paid off with a trifecta of critical, popular and business success. According to Pace Beijing president Leng Lin, the show has been embraced by Beijing's critical and artist community and all works sold have gone to mainland Chinese and Asian collectors, some with no track record of collecting western contemporary art.

Ruby shared his thoughts on making and showing art in the People's Republic with ARTINFO China. Read more...

Image: Pace Gallery Beijing

Thirty Years of video in China at the Minsheng Art Museum

The Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai opened in April 2010 with a thirty-year survey of contemporary Chinese painting. This month the Museum launched the second installment of its metanarrative, a survey of the moving image in China from its first appearance in 1988 through to 2011. Read more...

Image: Shanghai's Minsheng Art Museum

LEAP on design at the boundaries of art in China

LEAP is the international art magazine of contemporary China. Published six times a year it presents a mix of contemporary art coverage and cultural commentary. The August issue covers design at the boundaries of art, from fashion to architecture. If you want to check out the magazine you can look for its content to appear online at leapleapleap.com in the coming weeks.

Image: from LEAP's feature article on design in China

Para/Site announces new director

Hong Kong's Para/Site Art Space, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to contemporary art, has named Cosmin Costinas as its new executive director and curator. Prior to his new appointment Costinas was the curator at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst. He was also an editor of the magazines project of documenta 12 from 2005 to 2007.

Image: Cosmin Costinas

White Cube to open an outpost in Hong Kong

White Cube will be the latest major western gallery to open a branch in China according to the Financial Times. Scheduled to open in Hong Kong early next year, it will follow Gagosian's gallery launch there in January. A few years ago Hong Kong wasn't on the international art map, but recently it has emerged as a powerful new Asian art hub fueled by the rise of ART HK and a younger generation of Chinese tastemakers interested in buying Western art.

Perversion of Chinese Flavours at the Venice Biennale

China has finally announced its plans for this year's Venice Biennale. Curator Peng Feng has invited five artists to participate in his exhibition Perversion of Chinese Flavours. The artists will each create a separate installation taking as their staring point a different Chinese flavour or scent. The five artists and the flavours/scents they will evoke are: Cai Zhisong (tea); Liang Yuanwei (the pungent scent of China's traditional white spirit, baijiu); Pan Gongkai (the smell of lotus); Yang Maoyuan (medicinal herbs); and Yuan Gong (incense).

Image: Peng Feng, curator of China's pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale

Five British figures respond to the new dominance of the Chinese art market

According to The Global Art Market in 2010, a study commissioned by the Netherlands-based European Fine Art Commission, last year China became the second largest art market in the world with a global share of 23%. The US remained in first place with 34%, with Britain downgraded from second to third position with 22%. These figures were them questioned by the analysis of Artprice , which - focusing only on sales at public auctions (the European Fine Art Commission's study included gallery sales) - declared China to be the dominant art market in the world with 33% of the global sales.

To guage the Bristish art world's reaction to this shift, ARTINFO UK sounded out five prominent figures: Alexander Branczik, Director, Contemporary Art, Sotheby's London; Philip Dodd, Director of Made in China and Advisory Board Member of ART HK; Alex Sainsbury, Collector and Founding Director of Raven Row; Gavin Turk, Artist; and Neil Wenman, Director, Hauser & Wirth Gallery. You can see what they had to say here.

Image: Lichtenstein's "Ohhh... Alright" at a Christie's auction preview in October 2010

Bubble trouble in China's financial art market

The Chinese art market's headlong growth over the past few years has left some awaiting what seems an inevitable bursting of the bubble. The emergence of China as a pioneer of the art stock exchange - a new mode of investment that it beginning to pop up around the globe - has only led to greater worries of sustainability. Now Reuters reports that the country's Tianjin Cultural Artwork Exchange, which was launched in January, has brought trade on its two top artworks to a halt, fearing that runaway over-evaluation that caused shares to rise by 1,700 percent would endanger investors. Read more...

Others will be more concerned about the phenomenon of art being presented as an investment vehicle and the effect speculative money has on the art market, fearing it will push prices beyond their long-term, intrinsic art historical value and increase the risk of boom and bust as speculators reposition art as a financial rather than a collectable asset.

China now the world's second largest art market

Bloomberg reports that China has overtaken the United Kingdom to become the world's second largest art market after the United States. Auction and gallery sales in China totalled the equivalent of US$8.3 billion giving the country a 23% share of the global market.

Norman Foster to design the $2.8 billion Cultural District in Hong Kong

Norman Foster's "City Park" has been selected for the $2.8 billion West Kowloon Cultural District. According to a statement on the Foster + Partners web site, the 100 acre project is the largest cultural initiative in the world today. It will include a contemporary art museum, theatres, arts education centres, galleries, studios and commercial space, along with a 57-acre public park.

The art contemporary museum on the site, M+, is led by Lars Nittve, the first director of the Tate Museum. M+ will open in 2016.

Images: architect Norman Foster and the skyline of Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District

UCCA Beijing handover

Guy Ullens is to hand over the management of the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing to long term partners and divest himself of the institution. He will also sell in stages the extensive collection of Chinese contemporary art he amassed with his wife Myrian. Once he has done this he says he intends to spend more time on his charitable education work in Nepal and return to collecting young artists, this time with a focus on Indian rather than Chinese artists. Read more...

Image: Yan Pei-Ming, installation view of Landscape of Childhood, UCCA, 2005

Art HK and Art Basel to join forces?

The Art Newspaper reports that the increasingly blue-chip fair Art HK is in talks with Art Basel about a possible collaboration. Tim Etchells, one of the owners of ART HK, has confirmed that discussions are underway, but also says the fair has been approached by other people and that it's definitely not a done deal. 

2010 auction records set by mainland Chinese collectors

In 2010 mainland Chinese collectors really began to make their presence felt at auction houses around the world, showing what a game-changer the relatively new pool of buyers has become. Recently ARTINFO China looked back on the year and selected their picks for the top key lots of the year. Read more...

Image Xu Beihong's Ba People Fetching Water (detail), 1937, which sold for $25.8m, a record price for Chinese painting at auction

Starkwhite in the lineup for ART HK 2011

We are pleased to announce that we will be returning to ART HK in 2011 (we were at the 2009 and 2010 editions of the fair). While we will continue to work with art fairs in Europe and the USA - over the past two years we've participated in Art Basel's Art Statements and Art Unlimited, The Armory Show, Art Cologne and Art Los Angeles Contemporary - we are also committed to working with the art fairs that are emerging in the Asia/Pacific region such as ART HK.

The lineup of galleries for ART HK 2011 includes: 1301PE, ARNDT, Beijing Commune, Bernier/Eliades Gallery, Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Blum & Poe, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, James Cohan Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ, CONTEMPORARY FINE ARTS, Gagosian Gallery, Gladstone Gallery, Lisson Gallery, Long March Space, Marian Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Sean Kelly Gallery, Kukje Gallery, Yvon Lambert, Kate MacGarry, Galerie Urs Meile, Victoria Miro Gallery, The Modern Institute, NANZUKA UNDERGROUND, ONE AND J Gallery, Pace Beijing, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sperone Westwater, Spruth Magers Berlin London, Vilma Gold Gallery, Vitamin Space, White Cube and David Zwirner.

ART HK is clearly on the rise. The third edition of Art HK in 2010 attracted 47,000 visitors (up from 30,000 the previous year) compared to 60,000 for Art Basel and The Armory Show and is expected to increase in 2011. The international visitor mix was reflected in the fair's VIP list, which included influential collectors from Australia, China, France, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan and the USA, along with art museum directors and curators such as: 

Richard Armstrong, Director, Guggenheim Museum

Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg, Director, Los Angeles County Museum

Joseph Thompson, Director, MASS MoCA

Olga Viso, Director, Walker Art Center

Elizabeth Ann MacGregor, Director, MCA Sydney

Jock Reynolds, Director, Yale Art Gallery

Nigel Hurst, Director of the Saatchi Gallery, London

Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator, Guggenheim Museum

Maxwell Hearn, Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Shinji Kohmoto, Chief Curator, National Museum of Art, Kyoto

Yuko Hasegawa, Chief Curator Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

Yuike Kamiya, Chief Curator, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art

Barbara London, Associate Curator Museum of Modern Art

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-director of Exhibitions, Serpentine Gallery  

Annette Schonholzer and Marc Spiegler, Co-directors, Art Basel

Image: Hong Kong Exhibition and Convention Centre, venue for ART HK

An unusual partnership between Christie's and an affiliate of China's Ministry of Culture

Recently Christie's invited collectors, scholars and art patrons to its New York headquarters in the Rockefeller Centre for what it described as a special exhibition and symposium about the rise of Chinese contemporary art. However, as the NYT reports, the 29 works in the show were not produced by the politically focused Chinese artists who had helped Christie's earn millions of dollars at auction over the past five years. They were mostly by a group of realist painters whose work had been ignored by collectors and curators outside the country, and they were selected by a Chinese government-appointed panel.

The show, Trans-Realism, is part of a partnership between Christie's and an affiliate of China's Ministry of Culture which began just a year after the Chinese Government denounced Christie's for trying to sell two Qing dynasty bronzes that Beijing insisted were looted from the country 150 years ago. As part of the partnership, Christie's is considering financing a series of exhibitions with Chinese institutions like the Ministry of Culture's Centre of International Cultural Exchange.

Christie's art diplomacy is drawing criticism on the grounds that moves to promote artists selected by the Chinese government would alter the the role of the auction house and undermine its credibility with collectors. Others believe that Christie's has bowed to pressure from a government that often tries to silence critics and politically focused artists. But none of this is likely to deter Christie's as it moves to gain entry to China's booming auction market, which the Beijing-based group Artron says has grown to from $1.1 billion in 2004 to about $3.2 billion in 2008.

Image: the two disputed Chinese Qing dynasty bronzes

Shanghai Biennale opens

The 8th Shanghai Biennale, which opens to the public today, defines itself as a 'rehearsal' and as a reflective space of performance. The curators say the Biennale "aims to invite a wide range of participants - artists, curators, critics, collectors, museum directors and members of the audience - to rehearse in the Biennale a fertile theatre to reflect on the relations between art experimentation and the art system, between individual creativity and the public domain." This link takes you to a full outline of the curatorial thinking of the Biennale, which runs to 23 January 2011.

Image: The 8th Shanghai Biennial Curatorial Committee (from left) Li Lei, Fan Dian, Hua Yi and Gao Shiming

ART HK on the rise

"Lots of people have their eye on Hong Kong - it is the best performing market and China's bonded warehouse", Iwan Wirth told the The Art Newspaper earlier this year. ART HK director Magnus Renfrew is rapidly establishing himself as one of the gatekeepers of this haven for tax-free art sales and this year takes 92nd place on The Power 100, ArtReview's guide to the general trends, networks and forces that shape the art world.

We presented John Reynolds' A Table of Dynasties at ART HK 2009 and a group show at ART HK 2010 and we'll be announcing our lineup for the 2011 edition of the fair in the New Year.

Image: Magnus Renfrew, director of ART HK

ShContemporary 2010: a market for ideas

The following links take you to reviews of ShContemporary 2010, the art fair that styled itself as a market for ideas as well as an Asian outpost of the art market: ShContemporary opens with wary dealers and an academic cast and Shanghai's 'messiest' art show is back.

Image: Choi Jeong-Hwa's towering balloon installation at ShContemporary 2010

China's Great Firewall

We were unable to post from Shanghai because we couldn't jump the Great Firewall of China that allows Beijing's internet police to block access to blogs. However, we resume our daily posts today. 

Posts from China

While we aim to continue our daily posts, they may be intermittent this week as we are in Shanghai.