India asks Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art to remove a politically sensitive work from Indian Highway exhibition

Video artist Tejal Shah's art work I Love my India has been removed from the Indian Highway exhibition at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing - not at the request of the Chinese government, but rather one from Indian Government officials. The work depicting Muslims talking about the Godhra riots upset the sentiments of the Indian community in China leading the Indian Ministry of external Affairs to intervene.

The exhibition curated by Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Gunnar Kvaran opened at Serpentine in 2008 and traveled to venues in Oslo, Lyon and Rome without incident before its Bejing outing at the UCCA. Neither of the institutions has commented on the removal of the video which focuses, according to a description by the Serpentine, on "the ignorance and lack of understanding of the genocide against the Muslim minority in 2002."
Image: A video still from Tejal Shah's I Love my India

UCCA Beijing presents an exhibition of Parkett's collaborations with artists

The Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing is presenting Inside a Book a House of Gold, an exhibition of 212 editioned works by 192 artists produced in collaboration with Parkett since the journal's founding in Zurich in 1984. The exhibition takes its title from a poetic inscription by the most artistic of all Chinese Emperors, Song Zhenzong.

Affordability and portability are distinguishing features of Parkett editions, allowing collectors around the globe to pick up works by superstars, like Damien Hirst's ping-pong balls hovering on the hot air of a hair dryer, Jeff Koons' inflatable sculpture, Ai Weiwei's gilded fly swatter, Anish Kapor's spatial funnel contraptions, Andy Warhol's print of skeletons and Maurizio Cattelan's tongue-in-cheek self portrait. Many of the Parkett's editions have also found their way into the collections of major museums such as MoMA in New York.

This link takes you to the latest collaborations between artists and Parkett.
Image: Jeff Koons, Inflatable Balloon Flower (Yellow), 1997, PVC, 1300 280 x 1800mm, edition of 100

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

China Watch

Guy Ullens, the Belgian industrialist and collector of Chinese art since the mid-1980s, has sold 18 works from his collection to Chinese collectors. Proceeds from the sale (reported to be over USD20m) are to go towards financing the operations of the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing and to fund future acquisitions. Housed in a Bauhaus- style former arms factory, the UCCA is a non profit art centre funded by Guy and Miriam Ullens that "...presents exhibitions of established and emerging artists and develops a platform to share knowledge through education and research." The sale shows the rise of mainland Chinese collectors with an eye for contemporary Chinese art rather than antiquities. Meanwhile the international art world watches for signs of another shift in focus, this time away from Made in China towards art that is created in and/or presented in China.

Images: Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing