Abstract master Zao Wou-ki, one of China’s most significant artists whose works routinely fetch millions of dollars at auction, has died in Switzerland aged 93.

Zao, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, died on Tuesday and had been in hospital for 10 days in the western Swiss town of Nyon, his widow’s lawyer Marc Bonnant told Reuters.

[...]“He mixed Western influences with his Chinese identity to give his work a universal scope,” [French Foreign Minister] Fabius said in a statement. “With him, we are losing an emblematic figure of lyrical abstraction whose work made ​​an outstanding contribution.”

The New York Times outlines Zao’s emigration to France, his artistic lineage, and the popular reception of his work in the west:

Mr. Zao, who was born in Beijing in 1921, moved to France in 1948, just before the 1949 Communist takeover of China. He became a French citizen in 1964.

[...]Mr. Zao’s abstract works — influenced by both European abstraction and traditional Chinese brushwork — quickly drew the attention of galleries in New York and Paris, where he was regularly showing by the 1950s. He befriended contemporaries like Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miró.

[...]Considered one of the School of Paris artists, Mr. Zao was lauded in his adopted country, which held retrospectives of his works at major venues like the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais (1981), the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (2003) and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (2008). His works are also in the collections of museums like the Tate in London and the Guggenheim in New York.

Recognition came later in his homeland, where the art scene was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution.[...]

After waning in popularity in the 1990s, there was renewed demand for Zao’s work, especially in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The artist’s career was rejuvenated following a major retrospective in Paris in 2003. Since then, his blend of Chinese techniques with Western modernist aesthetics has caught the eye of wealthy Asian collectors – especially from Taiwan and mainland China – who have paid significant sums for his works.

In 2011, Mr. Zao was the top-selling, living Chinese artist at auction, with his works fetching $90 million in sales that year. Demand remains strong: Last week, his painting “10.03.83” sold for $4.8 million at a Sotheby’s sale in Hong Kong.

The South China Morning Post explains the progression of Zao’s influences, noting that his cosmopolitanism “bridged east and west,” making him a hit in western and Chinese art circles:

Art dealer Daphne King of Alisan Fine Arts, one of the first galleries to exhibit Zao’s art works in Hong Kong in 1993, said Zao was among a generation of Chinese artists studying in the West.

[...]Being exposed to Western art changed Zao’s artistic course. In 1951, he discovered Paul Klee’s paintings at museums in Bern and Geneva and it this was a big influence on him.

[...]Zao’s works were not just about the prices, said King. “Westerners thought he was Chinese, but Chinese thought he was very westernised. His works bridge the east and west,” she said.

Also see prior CDT coverage of contemporary art in China.

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Post tags: contemporary art, contemporary artists, obituary, painters, Zao Wou-ki
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Chen shocked the world in April when he made a daring, next-to-impossible escape, climbing over the wall surrounding his house (breaking his foot in the process) and catching a ride some 350 miles to Beijing, where he took refuge in the U.S. Embassy. After a tense, days-long diplomatic standoff closely involving Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (No. 3), a deal was struck under which Chen would be allowed to travel to the United States to study. Now at New York University, Chen has embraced his new role as an evangelist for human rights, making the case that incremental change — one village or even one person at a time — can eventually transform a superpower. Against all odds, he remains optimistic, believing that China, taking a cue from Japan and South Korea, must “learn Eastern democracy.” He even thinks it’s inevitable: “Nobody can stop the progress of history,” he says.

An interview with Chen Guangcheng by Isaac Stone Fish accompanies the list. In it, Chen discusses how the central government allows abuses by local authorities—see Guizhou journalist Li Yuanlong’s detention last week for a recent example—and the chances of change or even revolution in China’s near future.

The central government definitely knew I was illegally detained at home. As for how the local authorities invented lies to frame me to put me in prison, as for how they persecuted my entire family, [the central government] didn’t necessarily know about the details. Yet now, six months later, I still haven’t seen the central government follow the country’s laws and keep its promise and investigate and deal with those officials who recklessly and illegally committed crimes.

Throughout Chinese history, has any emperor said they want to hand over power? Every emperor wants his power to last generation after generation. But can they? The Communist Party cannot monopolize all of the power in the country forever. This is a reality they must accept.

The possibility of China facing a revolution in 2013 is pretty big. This is something that the powers that be in China understand more than anyone else. It’s a pity that international society still does not understand this and has still not prepared. America should immediately start moving from dealing with China’s powers that be to dealing with the Chinese people. It definitely won’t be like 1989.

Chen does not appear to view the possibility of revolution with any great relish: when asked what the worst idea of the year is, he answered “violence”.

Controversial artist Ai Weiwei, still unable to leave China over a year after his 81-day detention in 2011, is ranked 26th:

[…] Ai has found ways to occupy his time. When one of his Twitter followers asked in May whether he was working on any new artwork, Ai tweeted back, “I am the artwork.” In April, he set up cameras throughout his house, providing a live feed on his website and to his 170,000 followers. (“Twitter is my city, my favorite city,” he told FP this year.) The authorities soon pressured him into removing the cameras, evidently preferring that they be the only ones to watch the rotund 55-year-old work on his computer and play with his cats.

But make no mistake — this performance art is deeply political. Throughout his career Ai has insisted that artists have a duty to humanity that outweighs the obligations of nationalism. Even declaring one’s opposition to “trafficking children, selling HIV-infected blood, [and] operating slave labor coal pits” is enough to get branded as “anti-China” in today’s political climate, Ai once noted on his blog, asking, “If we aren’t anti-China, are we still human?”

Foreign Policy also published a slideshow from Ai’s first North American retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., noting that “the artist was not in attendance.”

British singer Elton John added a concert dedication to Ai’s list of recent accolades on Sunday. While dismissing this “disrespectful” gesture, Global Times took the opportunity to critique Chen and Ai’s inclusion in the Foreign Policy list:

Western society is seriously biased against China. When US magazine Foreign Policy compiled a list of 100 global thinkers from around the world, the first Chinese on that list was blind activist Chen Guangcheng, and the second was Ai Weiwei. Even to Chinese people who have sympathy for these two people, this list may seem ridiculous.

In a diverse era, we don’t hold that the existence of people like Chen and Ai is unexpected in China. Also, we don’t believe that the impact they have brought should be denied completely.

The selection of Chen and Ai makes people wonder whether the word “thinker” in Chinese and English have different meanings. We can just say that some Westerners are increasingly unable to contain themselves over China’s rise. They cannot control China through normal means and they are more likely to rush their fences.

A more nuanced piece of Aiconoclasm came last week from Paul Gladston at Randian:

There are […] significant dangers in the upholding of Ai as our sole representative/mediator of artistic resistance to authority within China. While Ai’s bluntly confrontational and often bombastic stance can be readily digested within Western liberal-democratic contexts where romantic notions of heroic dissent in the face of overwhelming power still persist, it is by no means representative of the critical positioning of most other Chinese artists. Ai may have situated himself admirably behind enlightened westernized ideals of freedom and openness, but the sheer bluntness and reductive simplicity of his critical approach to authority have effectively foreclosed a more searching discussion of contemporary art within China as well as the complex, web of localized cultural, social, political and economic forces that surround its production and reception.

[…] Ai Weiwei is right in drawing our repeated attention to the debilitating injustices of totalitarian power within China. He is also right to upbraid western viewers for their inability to see past what are for them the pleasurable ambiguities of contemporary Chinese art. Less convincing, however, is Ai’s wholly reductive view of the critical possibilities of contemporary art in China. By insisting on his own stridently oppositional approach towards power as the only legitimate game in town, and because we are already highly familiar with that approach, [he] has misrepresented the contemporary Chinese artworld. One might add that Ai is also romanticizing the conditions of criticality in the West.

At 54 in the Foreign Policy list is Yu Jianrong, for his concise but detailed roadmap for reform.

In April, he released a succinct, two-phase plan he called a “10-Year Outline of China’s Social and Political Development.” Despite its bland title, Yu’s blueprint offers a timetable for Chinese reform that for once is as credible as it is ambitious. The plan puts dates and specifics to the task, advocating, for example, a stronger law on private property, the revealing of “information pertaining to government affairs” and “officials’ property,” and the abolition of “speech crimes,” after which China should “open up” the media and political parties. Yu’s short manifesto immediately caused a splash when he released it to his nearly 1.5 million followers on the popular microblogging site Sina Weibo (though the government has maintained a deafening silence). “We’ve already decided to change,” Yu explained in an interview. “The question is: In which direction do we change, and from where do we start?” Sweeping reform in this authoritarian land of 1.3 billion won’t be easy, but Yu’s plan is as good a place to begin as any. The era, he said, of crossing the river “by feeling the stones” is over.

China Media Project’s David Bandurski translated Yu’s plan in March. Soon afterwards, Didi Kirsten Tatlow described it at The International Herald Tribune, together with some criticism from Tsinghua University political scientist Liu Yu:

Master plans like Mr. Kang [Youwei]’s, or Mr. Yu’s are “unrealistic,” she said.

“All Chinese intellectuals, especially the men, they tend to blur the line with being an official and then they’re thinking, ‘How should I design a system for the country?’ and ‘How to make progress?’

“In the West there are intellectuals who make proposals on specific things, but in general they don’t make plans for the whole country,” she said.

What is needed instead, she believes, is a broad debate, among ordinary people.

“A good plan should involve the whole society,” she said. “There should be a big debate on where the country should be going.”

Yu’s nomination for best idea of 2012 is Mo Yan’s controversial selection for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mo’s chief rival for the award, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, took 49th place on the Foreign Policy list as a consolation prize.

At 69 is environmentalist Ma Jun:

[…] A journalist turned environmentalist who founded the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, Ma applies scientific rigor to exposing such corporate violations (more than 90,000 to date), flagging everything from a small coal-tar factory improperly storing its dangerous waste to Apple suppliers poisoning workers with a toxic chemical used on touch screens — as well as local governments that flout environmental regulations across China. Dozens of major multinationals now consult Ma’s pollution readings when working with suppliers in China. And by documenting environmental violations that had long been obvious but were never compiled in a way the public could easily understand, Ma has given statistical ammunition to Chinese citizens trying to nudge the Communist Party into cleaning up its act.

Wang Jisi, “China’s most respected expert on the United States”, came in at 73:

[…] What does Wang want us to know? That the feel-good stories U.S. officials tell themselves about China’s global ascent are an elaborate form of denial. In an influential monograph co-authored by Brookings Institution senior fellow Kenneth Lieberthal, Wang this year described China’s actions on the world stage as rooted in the conclusion that “America will seek to constrain or even upset China’s rise.” Beijing’s view, he says, is that the United States is “heading for decline” and that China’s development model provides an “alternative to Western democracy and market economies.” The result? “[T]hese views make many Chinese political elites suspect that it is the United States,” Wang says, “that is ‘on the wrong side of history.’”

And at 83 is the Taiwanese-American former head of Google China, venture capitalist Kai-fu Lee:

In an article he published on his LinkedIn page in October, Lee named China’s narrowly focused school curriculum and the risk-averse nature of Chinese students, as well as the country’s chaotic Internet environment, among the reasons China hasn’t yet produced its own Mark Zuckerberg. That may be why he has also started a popular education website encouraging Chinese students to think more creatively. Although none of his companies has exploded yet, Lee’s ultimate contribution may be more fundamental: laying both the intellectual and financial groundwork for a revolution in the world’s largest online community.

Perhaps more significant to China for now than any of the above are Aung San Suu Kyi and Thein Sein, who top the list having begun to pilot the formerly reliable Chinese satellite of Myanmar (also known as Burma) into a more open and international orbit:

Aung San Suu Kyi, the soft-spoken, iconic political activist whom devotees call simply “the Lady,” may not seem like an obvious partner for Thein Sein, but she has become one by doing what few legends of her stature can: embracing the messy pragmatism of politics. Although Burma’s struggles are far from over — she has warned that international investment has been too rapid, and ethnic violence is escalating — the willingness of both the Lady and the general to embrace short-term compromise and foster long-term reconciliation in what was only recently one of the world’s most isolated countries is something to celebrate.

Fittingly, Aung San Suu Kyi finally was able to accept her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize in June. She used the occasion to remind the world of those like her, who struggle in the most forlorn places: “To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity.” It is a sentiment still felt from Aleppo to Havana, Pyongyang to Tehran, but also, as Aung San Suu Kyi and Thein Sein have shown, one that doesn’t need to be permanent.

See more on Chen Guangcheng, Ai Weiwei, Yu Jianrong, Ma Jun, Wang Jisi, Kai-fu Lee and Myanmar/Burma at CDT.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Apple, artistic freedom, artists, Burma, central government, Chen Guangcheng, contemporary art, contemporary artists, education, Global Times, Google, Haruki Murakami, Hillary Clinton, HIV, house arrest, IPE, Kaifu Lee, kenneth lieberthal, Li Yuanlong, local government, Ma Jun, mo yan, Myanmar, Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Prize, pollution, private property, reform, reformers, revolution, slave labor, surveillance, trafficking, transparency, wang jisi, year end lists 2012, Yu Jianrong
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“They’re still holding my passport,” Mr. Ai said. “They said they want to give it to me but have no clear time schedule for that.”

Mr. Ai was detained for 81 days last year and put on probation for one year after his release. That probation ended June 21. Mr. Ai said at the time that police officers in Beijing had told him that he could not leave China, but that he would soon have his passport returned.

“I think it’s that the person who’s responsible for my case didn’t get a clear order from above,” he said. “And maybe the people from above are busy with much more important issues.”

In a preview for an article which will appear in this week’s Huffington iPad magazine, Gazelle Emami sat down with Ai Weiwei at his Beijing studio:

Of everything discussed in an 80-minute interview at Ai Weiwei’s studio on the outskirts of Beijing -– including his 81-day detention in April last year, the government’s iron hold on his passport and the tax case that would never end–nothing roused the dissident artist so much as his fellow Chinese artists who stayed silent during his disappearance, while the Western art world cried, “Where is Ai Weiwei?”

“Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi, Xu Bing, Liu Xiaodong,” Ai lists off casually, as if he were taking attendance instead of denouncing China’s power art players.

See also Ai Weiwei’s take on “contemporary Chinese art”, as well as recent profiles of Ai and his former protege Zhao Zhao in Smithsonian Magazine and Spiegel, respectively, all via CDT.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, contemporary art, dissidents, United States
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What are we to make of a show that calls itself Art of Change: New Directions from China? I don’t think it’s worth discussing new directions in the context of Chinese art – there were no old directions, either. Chinese art has never had any clear orientation. Yes, the artists in this exhibition, which opened at the Hayward gallery in London last week, have struggled against the limitations imposed by the Chinese state more stridently than others. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is just another attempt to introduce western audiences to so-called “contemporary Chinese art”. How can you have a show of “contemporary Chinese art” that doesn’t address a single one of the country’s most pressing contemporary issues?

I am very familiar with the work of most of the artists in the show. Their work is certainly Chinese but, overall, the show casts no critical eye. It is like a restaurant in Chinatown that sells all the standard dishes, such as kung pao chicken and sweet and sour pork. People will eat it and say it is Chinese, but it is simply a consumerist offering, providing little in the way of a genuine experience of life in China today.

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, art censorship, contemporary art
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So what is it about Ai? What makes him, in Western eyes, the world’s “most powerful artist”? The answer lies in the West itself. Now obsessed with China, the West would surely invent Ai if he didn’t already exist. China may after all become the most powerful nation in the world. It must therefore have an artist of comparable consequence to hold up a mirror both to China’s failings and its potential. Ai (his name is pronounced eye way-way) is perfect for the part. Having spent his formative years as an artist in New York in the 1980s, when Warhol was a god and conceptual and performance art were dominant, he knows how to combine his life and art into a daring and politically charged performance that helps define how we see modern China. He’ll use any medium or genre—sculpture, ready-mades, photography, performance, architecture, tweets and blogs—to deliver his pungent message.

Ai’s persona—which, as with Warhol’s, is inseparable from his art—draws power from the contradictory roles that artists perform in modern culture. The loftiest are those of martyr, preacher and conscience. Not only has Ai been harassed and jailed, he has also continually called the Chinese regime to account; he has made a list, for example, that includes the name of each of the more than 5,000 schoolchildren who died during the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 because of shoddy schoolhouse construction. At the same time, he plays a decidedly unsaintly, Dada-inspired role—the bad boy provocateur who outrages stuffed shirts everywhere. (In one of his best-known photographs, he gives the White House the finger.) Not least, he is a kind of visionary showman. He cultivates the press, arouses comment and creates spectacles. His signature work, Sunflower Seeds—a work of hallucinatory intensity that was a sensation at the Tate Modern in London in 2010—consists of 100 million pieces of porcelain, each painted by one of 1,600 Chinese craftsmen to resemble a sunflower seed. As Andy would say, in high deadpan, “Wow.”

Ai’s work will be on display at Washington D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden from early October through February 2013, his second show in the American capital this year. See also reviews in The New York Times and The Guardian of Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry, the documentary film by Alison Klayman that premiered in late July.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, contemporary art, dissidents, Smithsonian, washington post
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Mr. Jennrich, 31, the company’s general manager and a German citizen, was taken away on the evening of March 30 during a raid of the business’s Beijing offices; hours later Ms. Chu, 29, its operations manager, was summoned for questioning. Mr. Jennrich’s family and colleagues have expressed concern for his health, saying he has been forced to share a cell with 11 others. During the first days of his detention, they added, he was interrogated for 36 hours straight, a violation of Chinese law.

“It’s a living nightmare,” said Mr. Jennrich’s fiancée, Jenny Dam, who said the couple had planned to marry in May.

No trial date has been set.

The detentions have put a spotlight on the mercurial Chinese legal system and raised questions among collectors and industry executives about the potential pitfalls of China’s fast-growing art and antiques market, which last year surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest, according to the European Fine Art Foundation. The crackdown, industry professionals have warned, could dissuade Chinese collectors from bringing home art purchased abroad.

Some have privately questioned the government’s motivation, noting that Integrated Fine Art Solutions has handled the work of Ai Weiwei, the maverick artist who has earned the government’s wrath for his criticism of the ruling Communist Party. Others have suggested that the case is aimed at taking down a foreign-owned company to clear the way for a well-connected domestic player that recently began lavishly investing in the art-handling business.

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Post tags: Ai Wei Wei, art imports, contemporary art, Nils Jennrich, smuggling, tax evasion
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Ai has fused a lot of perennially popular art-world tropes into a single conceptual life-as-art juggernaut. He’s a figurehead of the once-burgeoning Chinese art market, an artist who keeps the line between life and work fluid; an auteur who creates his work in collaboration with other people, like the traditional craftsmen who used post-and-beam construction to assemble “Fragments” without a nail or screw, just a thwack of hammer sending wooden peg through perfectly aligned cut holes. He’s also destroyed artifacts, like the Han Dynasty urn he broke in a triptych of 1995 photos. He’s worked as an architect; sent 1,001 people from China to roam the streets of Kassel, Germany, in one of the works he displayed in the German megashow documenta XII in 2007; made films documenting the physical transformation of Beijing; protested corruption and human-rights violations in China on his blog, which was a part of his art, as well. Yet he’s said he wants his works to be judged on their merits as objects rather than ideas.

So: the objects. “Fragments” — here in its first American showing — is defined by its material: Ai collected the wood and thought about how best to use it. It’s an embracing physical presence, dominated by the warm darkness of the old wood. But the wood, hacked and muted, embodies a complex narrative about culture and value: Once-holy temples become meaningless and are discarded to make room for progress, then are reclaimed as ruins and reassembled into an object that ends up being even more venerated.

See a video of the installation of Fragments:

Meanwhile, in New York, a portion of the tiny sunflower seeds commissioned by Ai for an exhibit at London’s Tate Gallery sold at auction at Sotheby’s for $782,500.

Read more about Ai Weiwei and contemporary art in China via CDT.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, artists, contemporary art
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With China’s economy booming, art collectors there have become an increasingly powerful force in the market, demonstrating a growing interest in Western as well as Asian art.

At Sotheby’s spring sale, a Chinese buyer bought the evening’s priciest painting — Picasso’s “Femme Lisant (Deux Personnages)” — for $21.3 million. In March, at the auction house Lebarbe, in Toulouse, France, a Chinese buyer set a new French record for Chinese art with a $31 million bid on a scroll painting from the Imperial Palace in Beijing. Last year an anonymous telephone bidder who was believed to be Chinese paid $106.5 million for Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” at Christie’s, a record for a work of art at auction.

Chinese auction houses are now selling works at a pace formerly associated with those in London and New York. One company that tracks the fine-art market, Artprice, reported that they were responsible for some $8.3 billion in sales, which would make them the world leader.

“We have seen exponential growth by mainland Chinese buyers who were brought up during the Cultural Revolution,” said Henry Howard-Sneyd, Sotheby’s vice chairman for Asian art. “These are successful business people with huge amounts of money at their disposal.”

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Post tags: art collecting, art collectors, contemporary art, wealth gap
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The terms of Ai’s release forbid him from discussing his legal case. But on Friday, Ai spoke by phone from Beijing about his artwork, specifically his touring installation “Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads,” which opens Saturday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and runs through February.

The artist, 54, was clearly in a chatty mood and the conversation touched on his health and even his recent return to Twitter.

Ai won’t be able to attend the opening of “Circle” at LACMA because he is confined to Beijing as part of his bail arrangement. “Circle” features large-scale statue heads of the Chinese zodiac and is inspired by those at China’s Yuanming Yuan palace, which was pillaged by British and French military forces in 1860.

“It’s about the future and the past, and how China is looked at today and how it looks at itself,” explained Ai. “It has many, many different layers — is it art or not art, and to what degree?”

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, contemporary art
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But the artist, Giuseppe Tampone , insisted that “Bye Bye” was not mistranslation, that he had been misunderstood. At the website www.byebyeaiweiwei.com, his explanation was presented in hard-to-understand English: “Bye Bye Ai Weiwei for all those that will not shout by any means ‘I don’t accept the bye bye.’”

The rest of his statement needs translation into comprehensible English: Stampione argued that “Hello Ai WeiWei” was “too easy,” because it seemed to offer hope, while hope in his view implied a passive stance. What was required, he argued, was “to realize the terrible situation in which Ai WeiWei is living today,” and then to take action to free him—political action, pressuring government leaders to take a stand and make demands of the Chinese authorities.

One more meaning he said he wanted to convey: “Bye Bye Ai Weiwei for all those who think that it could never happen to them.” Fair enough. Nevertheless, “Bye Bye Ai Weiwei” must be judged a failure.

[...] Perhaps the most striking thing about all this is the absence of any recognition of Ai Weiwei’s imprisonment on the part of the officials of the Biennale, especially curator Brice Curiger. Ai Weiwei was mentioned only once at an official event: at the first day opening of the preview, Paolo Baratta, president of the Biennale, told reporters, “We are great friends with the Chinese.” Then came a pause that implied “but,” followed by “I have written a letter to the ambassador of China in Italy saying how wonderful it would be if we could have happy news about Ai Weiwei.” And that was it for Ai WeiWei at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, contemporary art, venice biennale
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“THE Travelogue of Dr Brain Damages”, a show of Kenneth “Tin-Kin” Hung’s artwork, opened recently in Manhattan. Mr Hung’s garish and busy large paintings feature images of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders juxtaposed with icons of Western culture, such as Marilyn Monroe and the Mario Brothers (of Nintendo fame). These pieces are arresting, and I wish Mr Hung success, but most Western viewers will fail to understand some of the games the artist is playing. His work depends heavily on Chinese puns about internet censorship.

The Chinese have played with homophones and near homophones (usually differing only by a tone) for a long time. (They’re a staple at the Chinese New Year.) More recently, this feature of Chinese has been particularly useful for evading the censors. When the authorities banned the phrase cào nǐ mā, or “fuck your mother”, from the Chinese internet, in the name of combating vulgarity, the Chinese were quick to coin an internet hero, the Grass Mud Horse, whose name is a near homophone: Cǎo Ní Mǎ. Maorilyn Maoroe can be seen with him above. He is an opponent of the River Crab, a pun on “harmonious”, the official description of the society censorship is meant to promote.

The Grass Mud Horse is just one of ten mythical creatures all designed to talk about naughty stuff through puns. Mr Hung includes a painting of another of them, the great French-Croatian Squid, whose Chinese name requires a little English to get the pun. He is Fǎ Kè Yóu, and wears a Mao jacket while blowing an inflationary bubble with chewing gum.

For more background and a glossary of about 200 similar terms created by Chinese netizens, please browse CDT’s Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon.

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Post tags: contemporary art, grass-mud horse, Internet culture
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Zhang and Li wrote the following essay about imprisoned artist and activist Ai Weiwei. Translated by Vivian Wu (Read the original Chinese here):

Ai Weiwei Is a Creative Artist

By Li Xianting and Zhang Yihe

In the summer of 1957, Gao Ying was pregnant. But she was planning an abortion because her marriage (in all but name) with Ai Qing was the focus of criticism and was being severely punished. But Ai Qing insisted on keeping the baby. He said, “This is a work by both of us. Maybe it will be a masterpiece.” [1]

This baby was named Ai Weiwei, and indeed, it was a masterpiece. We have abundant reason to say: Ai Weiwei is a creative artist, as well as an art curator and social activist who is guided by love, conscience, and a sense of social responsibility.

I first got to know Ai Weiwei during the Star Exhibition in 1980, after seeing several of his water landscape oil paintings. The paintings showed picturesque scenes commonly seen in China’s water towns. Very fluid lines sketched the contours of residences and the river’s course. The coloring especially was not of a conventional sketching style; rather, it resembled the Chinese literati Southern School. The color was added after outlining. His lines were neither constrained by the rules of conventional color application nor the structure of the physical image. Rather, several lines of blue were painted in bold brushstrokes. We were so impressed by his boldness and casualness, and his pursuit of the transformation of Chinese painting elements.

Later, Ai Weiwei went to the US, and we heard no news of him. Until the early and mid-1990s, when we were in contact with the artists in Beijing’s East Village, we learned that he had provided a great deal of help to artists facing difficulties. He also paid for the publication of Black Cover Book (1994), White Cover Book (1995) and Grey Cover Book (1997) with his own money, to introduce artists’ works, especially performance art in the East Village. Actually, in those days, the entire Chinese art world was still in a period of deep freeze. Artists Ma Liuming and Zhu Ming were both arrested because of their performance art. So the three books undoubtedly helped bond and encourage the artist community. More than that, the first information about Chinese performance art was passed on to many western art museums and critics through these albums free of charge. “Talent and intelligence, no gallants could compare to him. Draw back, he has thousands of wonderful plans.” [2] After this, Ai Weiwei devoted himself widely to various fields and has been active as an independent curator, arts promoter, social activist, architect and artist in Chinese and international arts communities.

With Swiss collector Uli Sigg, Ai Weiwei co-founded the Annual Young Artist Award and invited critics from China and abroad to join the judges’ panel. Though we don’t think the Award had a significant impact on the development of Chinese contemporary art, it provided a reference for the future development in the international arena and expanded Chinese artists’ aesthetic judgments of contemporary art. He co-founded China Art Archives & Warehouse with the late Dutch curator Hans Van Dijk and promoted exhibitions of many contemporary avant-garde Chinese artists. Spanning a decade, the CAAW has played a remarkable role promoting the development of Chinese contemporary art. Almost at the same time, he established his own studio, together with the studios he designed for other artists, became the earliest groundbreaking work of the Caochangdi Art District. Nowadays Caochangdi Art District is one of the most active art districts in Beijing; without a doubt, his was a banner project. Furthermore, he did remarkable work to promote China’s contemporary art overseas. In 2007, he was curator of an exhibition “Mahjong” at Musée Schweizerisches Landesmuseum (Swiss National Museum), which was an overview of Contemporary Chinese art during the past decade. He is no doubt a bridge helping the European art circle to understand milestones of China’s contemporary art development.

Ai Weiwei designed a large number of architectural works, and of course the world knows that he was the artistic consultant for the Olympic “Bird’s Nest” Stadium. What is worth stressing is that in the design, he created a combination of red and gray bricks- common materials in Chinese traditional architecture, with the modern concrete in a miscellaneous tangle. The combination has a striking visual effect that reveals both the traditional intricate texture and modern simplicity. This style later became Ai Weiwei’s symbolic design and won him a reputation both in China and global architecture fields. Especially in “the Dining Hall project in the Jinhua Architectural Art Park”, his design solved lighting and other functional problems. Fiber cement board and glass were cut into the wall and were assembled into irregularly-shaped exterior curtain walls. The interior walls and furniture were all assembled of various materials in diverse formats. Ai Weiwei’s attempt at simple construction with cheap materials is so unique and inspiring amid the insane and extravagant urbanization.

As an artist, Ai Weiwei was deeply influenced by Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys. But if we take a broader view of the developing path of contemporary art since the early 1900s, no artist has not benefited from these two mentors. They radically changed the identity of contemporary artists from craftsperson to public intellectual, thereby differentiating them from traditional artists. Specifically, wisdom and ideology, interpretation of cultural and social incidents, mockery, incitement, parody and irony in the modes of expression, and the figurative interpretation of existing articles in daily life — all these originated from the inspiration of daily life. It’s the feeling, love and unchained will of an artist based on his living status and position in the public sphere. It’s neither indulgence in self-recognition as a traditional literati nor the meticulous but minute technical details as a craftsman. Regardless of art’s social position and love, or the vision and approach, nearly a hundred years of contemporary art’s accumulated experience has challenged traditional art. So without such basic principles established over the past century in the contemporary art field, any attempt to evaluate and understand Ai Weiwei and the revolutionary development of contemporary art will be in vain.

Among his most controversial works, there are “parodies” of the masterpieces in Western art history. For example, his work “Foundation of Light,” exhibited at Tate Liverpool, is apparently a parody of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. Tatlin had made three models of the Monument to the Third International in 1920, 1924 and 1925. All three models were five or six meters high. In the center of the structure was a core consisting of a cube and cylinder, both made of glass; the interior of the building included many functional design elements. If constructed, The Monument was to be twice the height of the 318-meter-high Empire State in New York, the highest building in the 1920s. Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International existed only in model form, but the idea and the model were both impressive. The proposal was regarded as a work of architecture commemorating the Communist revolution, so the design became a symbol of constructivism and utilitarianism. Ai Weiwei’s design “The Fountain of Light”, is a large-scale chandelier of steel and crystal. It is seven meters high and its pedestal’s diameter is six meters. To understand and interpret this work, one must first borrow the interpretation of Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International”. Or we should say Weiwei’s “The Fountain of Light” and Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International” have a corresponding relationship in the context of the history of international communism, so the audience sees the two works have corresponding social implications. The chandelier and foundation in Weiwei’s “Fountain of Light” directly connect us to the clumsy “lighting project” and “square fountains” erected all over China in its urbanization process. Or if we look at the two works in an historical perspective, they become an exaggerated satire of international communism.

Using different materials and textures from those in the original artistic masterpieces can be a way to parody or mock, and hence create a new meaning in a new context. For example, the caricature that adds a moustache on the face of Mona Lisa is based on the original version of The Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s famous masterpiece, and this is the primary condition for the works’ connotation. There are numerous works such as this in the wave of American pop art in the 1960s. Another example is Roy Lichtenstein’s “Masterpiece” whose images were borrowed from popular cartoons from the 1950s in the US. Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” and silk screened portraits of Marilyn Monroe are world famous. In the 1980s and 1990s, more masterpieces were subject to parody. Chinese artists, like artists in other countries, have created many works following this momentum. Those who criticized Weiwei for plagiarizing in some of his works, were actually ignorant of art history. Weiwei’s “A Ton Of Tea” (exhibited at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo) is a parody of “Not Art/Goods!”, a cube made by Johannes Stüttgen and others using 100 kilograms of honey to commemorate Joseph Beuys, and it is known by everybody that this idea is based on the “Honey Pump in the Workplace” and “Chair with Grease.” Especially “Chair with Grease” is a three-dimensional object with an angular surface and this inspired Stüttgen and his colleagues to build a cube of 100 kilograms of honey to commemorate Beuys. Thus there is the possibility of forming a correspondence between two sculptures, on both the model and the texture. So Ai Weiwei replaces material and volume, but the message conveyed to the audience will show the contrast between the material of tea and the huge volume weighing one ton. The 100-kilograms of honey symbolizes Beuys spirit, but what does a ton of tea represent in Chinese culture? Such a relationship between the two will certainly create a new contrast and association of ideas.

In fact, Ai Weiwei has been longing to find new meaning in the adaptation of traditional Chinese textures and structures, and he is especially obsessed with rosewood and the mortise and tenon joints that are commonly found in traditional Chinese furniture. His Huanghuali wood sculptures Divina Proportion (the bigger one, with a 2.5 meter diameter, exhibited in Mori Tokyo, and the smaller one, with a 1.7 meter diameter, exhibited in Haus De Kunst in Munich) presents a giant wood soccer ball ten times the size of the real soccer ball. Huanghuali wood, a luxurious Chinese red wood, was exquisitely carved into an extravagant structure, thereby creating a sensory combination of absurdness and reality. Chinese soccer fans are obsessed with the sport with a nationalist expectation that it could win China honor as a super power. But in reality, they are repeatedly disappointed by the mediocre performance of Chinese soccer teams. Psychologically, such disappointment reflects a psychological tendency to link the victory of Chinese soccer to a symbol of China’s prosperity as a superpower. Weiwei’s soccer sculpture, its powerful structure and meticulously tender red wood technique, represents the contrast between the power of soccer and the delicacy of red wood antiques. His similar famous works include the Huanghuali wood sculpture “Map of China” and “Cubic Meter Tables,” 2009 which is a parody of a cubic design by Sol LeWitt, 1991. Under the principles of minimalism, Ai Weiwei cares only about texture and structure; he simply wants to stress full attention on the aesthetic sensibility of the beautiful wood and the nail-free furniture joinery techniques.

The Zodiac Heads went on display last week in New York. Weiwei’s design is a parody based on a famous water clock designed by European Jesuits for the Western-style gardens of the Summer Palace during the reign of Manchu emperor Qianlong in the 18th century. The originals, with the western-style gardens, were looted in 1860 at the end of the Opium War by French and English troops, which has never been forgotten in China. Some of the Zodiac heads were retrieved from the west by Chinese companies with an enormous amount of capital, although almost all antique experts thought the deal wasn’t worth the money. But the patriotic news actually became the best advertisement for the companies involved. Based on this background, Ai Weiwei designed this circle of Zodiac Heads. All the twelve heads are made in cast copper and gilt bronze, 3-meters high, almost ten times larger than the originals. When twelve giant shiny gold zodiac heads confront the audience, they imply a message that Ai might just want to tell the world: that the luxurious fabrication of the dozen heads, just like that expensive “patriotic buy-back”, is totally a joke. What is more interesting is that this isn’t yet the end of the story. If the world-renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art plans to collect this circle of heads in the US, that means Weiwei is selling a set of duplicates that were in no case created using Chinese aesthetics and sold to foreigners who would like to collect at a price. Then, which way is more patriotic? Who is more intelligent? The buy-back of the looted original Zodiac Heads by Chinese companies or Ai Weiwei?

Of course, the most offensive part about Ai Weiwei in some people’s eyes is his series of actions. In fact, in our point of view, Ai Weiwei has never been a politician, although some of his behavior indeed contains political elements. But that is art, performance art or event art. Besides, performance art by its nature is freedom in life’s activities, and acts of artistic creation often go beyond people’s general understanding and senses in ordinary life. This will naturally lead to aloofness from or clashes with the state ideological apparatus, and furthermore have the nature of defamation, rebellion and defiance. Therefore, we must hereby make a solemn statement that politics is an activity with an agenda, objects and organization, but Ai’s behavior or the events he designed are not political campaigns. Rather, they are aimed at expressing emotional and sensory feeling as an individual. His behavior and events are of a certain public nature, and his works in this category are somehow creative.

A review of the history of China’s performance art will be necessary here to help elaborate our statement. It has gone through four phases. The first phase is from 1985 to 1987 when cultural criticism was fermented in the whole society. Performance art was usually conducted in the sites of cultural symbolic meanings, such as the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs. Artists bound themselves up, suggesting the suppression on individual expression. The second phase lasted until the early 1990s, and was featured with waves of events and popular art. This was related to the culture of consumption and commercialism. Rock and roll, pop music, popular painting all presented a political irony. For example, there were performances symbolizing social behavior during the Mao Era. Artists acted as Lei Feng [a well-known army solder who personified altruism in the 1960s] doing good deeds or passing towels to coalminers. The third phase was from early 1990s to the mid-1990s, when some artists started gathering in the East Village, a place near Maizidian, which is where Beijing’s Great Wall Hotel is now located in the east part of Beijing. It was named East Village and was known as an avant-garde artistic community in the early 1990s. Their works stressed body language and featured autosadism to express the hardship of living through troubled times. And the fourth phase was featured by Ai Weiwei’s performance art. Distinctively different from the previous phases, in this phase Ai Weiwei went beyond the general public. His works emphasize relevance to a certain social context, stressing love and social responsibility, social criticism and communication with the public. So it’s Ai Weiwei who truly pushed the spectrum of China’s contemporary art, from introvert to a broader spectrum that cast full attention on society, the public, and created a channel for the public to understand and take part in his contemporary art, which is closely related to the people’s current lives. Ai Weiwei thus created his own idiom for performance art. He knew too well that the public sphere in China was changed with the emergence of the cyber world. He was also skillful at using public media, especially the Internet. This led to his creative slogan: “The internet headline party”. Every performance or event art had a catchy and easy to circulate characteristic such as “Public investigation” on the list of the names of children killed in the Wenchuan Sichuan Earthquake; “The July 1st Web Boycott” — calling on Internet users not to use the web on July 1, 2010; “The Old Mother Kicking the Flowers” — using a cell phone to make on-the-spot recordings of violent people with ulterior motives.

Ai Weiwei’s works draw attention to events in society; by expressing his own feelings of love and anger, his own resistance, and fearlessness he has helped many Internet users reach a consensus, share their anger, and share the love.

No doubt, his remarks, works and especially behavior in recent years have not only presented his unique narrative and sense of power, but have also demonstrated to the society and public contemporary art’s basic concern for the existential status of humanity.

Why did he do this? In a letter written on January 4th 1978 , Ai Weiwei gave his best explanation. He said: “The endless memory (of the past) poisoned our young souls like snakes, but it didn’t kill us. On the contrary, I just require a better life for myself! For twenty years, there has been stupidity, incompetence, ignorance and weakness, and only now am I becoming a bit more clear-headed. Live, and be your own master. To lead a life of purpose, take your own road.”

When he wrote this, he was 21.

May 2011

[1] from Gao Ying’s memoir: Me and Ai Qing, Beijing October Literature Publishing House, page 29.

[2] a line from a poem written by Li Xianting

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An outspoken artist angers rulers with his savage, satirical wit. A crusader for political freedom and social justice, he lives in fear of arrest. Beaten and jailed, he becomes famous far beyond the borders of his land.

That was Voltaire, the hero of Europe’s 18th-century Enlightenment.

It is also Ai Weiwei, one of China’s best-known artists, seized by the police at the Beijing international airport on April 3, two days after a major German exhibition about the Enlightenment, Europe’s flowering of reason, science and tolerance, opened in the heart of the capital in the National Museum of China on Tiananmen Square.

“There is certainly a parallel,” said Bao Pu, the Hong Kong-based political commentator and publisher of New Century Press. His father, Bao Tong, a former aide to the liberal Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang, was jailed for seven years after the crushing of the 1989 democracy movement.

Like Voltaire’s, Mr. Ai’s work points toward change, Mr. Bao said. “Art is at the forefront of social change,” he said. “In the end, it is part of a larger social context.”

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Each of his photos requires long hours of preparation, the longest being ten plus hours. He transforms himself into a painting canvas, and with his assistant’s help, he blends in with the background.

He said he tries to convey message through his works, “Chinese artists are in a very difficult situation. The reason why I came up with this idea is many artists’ workshops were demolished forcibly. I wanted to create a series of photos titled ‘Hiding in the City’ to protest in silence the adverse circumstances artists live in, the terrible attitudes the society takes towards art.”

See more of Liu Bolin’s work via CDT.

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The baron opened the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in a former munitions factory in the 798 district of Beijing in November 2007. The not-for-profit gallery, which contains three exhibition halls, an auditorium, restaurant, library, and bookstore, was entirely funded by Ullens.

Speaking to The Art Newspaper, Ullens said he had originally hoped to use UCCA to show his extensive holdings of Chinese contemporary art. “That idea was very quickly shot down … so we [moved] very quickly to promoting Chinese art by doing special exhibitions and temporary shows.”

At first, UCCA struggled to find its feet. Six months after its launch, four out of the five senior staff members who had been introduced to the press at the launch had resigned or had been replaced.

The gallery was criticised for employing too many Europeans—its director is the French curator Jérôme Sans—amid suggestions that the Chinese resented a foreigner opening an ambitious and important institution like UCCA. Ullens admitted those suggestions were partly true. “The Chinese have been nice, we’ve had very nice relationships, we’ve never had censorship. The problem is they have structures and you need to have Chinese partners to navigate the structures. So it’s true, to some extent it’s true.”

Read about the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art when it first opened, via CDT.

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