| May-21-2008 |
| Article: Hong Kong\'s Art Aspirations |
The city wants to be Asia's culture capital, and ART HK 08, a glittering event of high-profile artworks and VIPs, may be just the ticket
By Frederik Balfour in Business Week
May 16, 2008, 7:25AM EST
Art by Jean-Michel Basquiat photo courtesy of Max Lang Gallery
At Hong Kong's convention center overlooking Victoria Harbor, a large crowd gathers around local performance artist Li Wei as he shakes and wriggles in an effort to shed hundreds of mirror shards stuck to his body. Nearby, another Hong Kong artist, Movana Chen, shuffles her way through the crowd wrapped head to toe in a "body container" she knitted from shredded catalogues from luxury retailer Shanghai Tang and ArtAsiaPacific magazine. When not focusing on Chan, hundreds of VIP guests, clutching flutes of Moët Chandon (LVMH) champagne, roam the floor for a sneak preview of contemporary art from every corner of the world. And in the VVIP section, the very special guests sit on white leather couches, nibbling seared tuna, Thai shrimp cakes, and filo with baked goat cheese, courtesy of lead sponsor Lehman Brothers (LEH).
Welcome to the opening night of ART HK 08, the city's first world-class art fair in more than a decade. Hong Kong officially brands itself "Asia's World City," and it has a lot going for it: superb infrastructure, an extraordinary skyline, beautiful countryside, and some of the best shopping and food anywhere. It has also long been a town whose denizens have unashamedly served Mammon—and the relentless pursuit of material wealth has, to put it bluntly, turned the city into something of a cultural wasteland.
New Wealth Looking for an Outlet
Magnus Renfrew is trying to change that. If Renfrew, the director of the Hong Kong International Art Fair, has his way, the Special Administrative Region may establish itself as a major stop on the global art circuit on a par with London's Frieze Art Fair, Art Basel Miami Beach, and TEFAF Maastricht. After all, there's no shortage of buying power in the region: Hong Kong is the third largest art auction market after New York and London, according to Christie's, the world's largest auction house. Christie's sold $473 million worth of art in Hong Kong last year, compared with $2.67 billion in New York and $2.04 billion in London.
Contemporary artworks from China, Korea, and India have seen meteoric price gains in recent years. And, unlike the U.S., the E.U. or China, Hong Kong has no import taxes on art, making the city more attractive for both collectors and dealers. "It's an ideal location for an international art fair," says Renfrew. "The earth is tipping on its axis, and the economies of Asia and all the new wealth created means people are looking for different ways to spend their money."
Whether Hong Kong is ready to embrace Renfrew's vision will be revealed during the fair, which runs from May 15—18. ART HK 08 features over 600 works from 102 galleries representing 20 countries from the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and North America. There is $64 million worth of art for sale, including pieces from some of the top contemporary dealers.
Blue-Chip Works
London's Ben Brown Fine Arts is flogging an Andy Warhol silk screen of the 1962 Studebaker Avanti cars worth about $3.7 million, and crosstown rival Marlborough Fine Art is hawking a Francis Bacon work entitled Man at the Wash Basin with a list price of $34 million. There are also works by Damien Hirst, Picasso, and Robert Rauschenberg.
But while such blue-chip works from the West may command the highest prices, Art HK 08 also aims to cash in on the growing demand for Asian contemporary works from India, China, Korea, and Japan. More than 60% of the galleries are from the region, including 12 from Hong Kong and several from Shanghai and Beijing, featuring such hot-selling mainland artists as Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Mingjun, and Xu Bing. Other fast-rising Asian stars include Rashid Rana of India, Haris Purnomo of Indonesia, and Korea's Bae Joon-sung.
Hong Kong's gateway status is a big selling point for Max Lang, who brought works from his eponymous gallery in New York including an oil painting by Jean Michel Basquiat priced at $7.5 million, an oil by Keith Haring, and works by up-and-coming Chinese photographer Cui Xiuwen. "The art world goes where the money goes," says Lang. "There is lots of luxury and affluence, and this is a huge banking center, and high net worth and the art world go hand in hand. This whole area is inordinately wealthy."
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| May-20-2008 |
| Article: Art fairs don’t die they just multiply |
Maastricht, Armory, Basel, Frieze, Arco, Miami, of course. But Bologna, Abu Dhabi, Rotterdam, Minneapolis and Stockholm? Who goes to these fairs and are they really necessary? Judging by a hilarious and despairing account of selling absolutely nothing at the recent Art Cologne (read his candid fair obituary here), dealer Kenny Schachter seems to be advocating a cull in the number of deadwood art fairs. Cologne’s problems are well documented and numerous leadership wrangles mean that it’ll get another revamp next year, but to what end?
Similarly, it was with much trepidation that a gaggle of young London dealers sloped off to the newly reborn Art Chicago, formerly the US’s pre-eminent art fair, to exhibit in the invited section of its contemporary sideshow NEXT. What concerns most of them is that the new owners Merchandise Mart (who also own the Armory, Volta and the Toronto Fair) were simultaneously holding three other fairs in the same building (The M. Mart International Antiques Fair, The Artist Project and the Intuit Show of Outsider and Folk Art) under the banner of Artropolis, like some kind of multi-storey monster-truck car park for art.
Despite the mild protestations of their president Chris Kennedy (yes, of that family) – ‘We’re not trying to be the Macy’s of the art world’– Merchandise Mart’s new financial muscle and the windy city’s track record suggest that Chicago deserves another crack of the whip, but when will some of these other art fairs learn to just quietly lay down and die? Oh, and how many dealers do you know ever admit to selling very little or nothing at all?
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| May-14-2008 |
| Chou Chu Wang at Kaohsiung International Container Arts Festival |
Aki Gallery and Taiwan Contemporary Art Link are delighted to announce our artist Chou Chu Wang at Kaohsiung International Container Arts Festival, and will showing her work in Genoa, Italy from 24 May to 31.
Based on the two concepts of ecological concern and ustainable urban development, the Kaohsiung International Container Arts Festival, 2007 is intended to explore Kaohsiung’s cultural identity and its characteristics as a city by looking back at its development from the past to the present. Containers and ecology are the two major themes of the estival this year. Container transportation is one of Kaohsiung's economic arteries while the container can also serve as a meaningful metaphor for ecological messages for it can imply the migration of life, intercultural connections, media of life and multiplication of being.
Ecology, in this festival, refers to its most fundamental concept—home, according to semantic interpretations. The festival also discusses ecological disruptions, global warming and many other problems that humans have caused collectively up to the present and the consequences we will have to bear in the future.
As the themes assume considerable importance and open up varied possibilities for artists to develop and create their works, this year we received a record high number of applications from both home and abroad. The competition among the applicants was of course rather intense and, after careful review and discussion, totally 13 container works by artists from eight countries were selected to be on display in the festival, including the one (No 091138-05) by Zik
Group from Israel who was invited to join the festival.
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| May-10-2008 |
| Contemporary art “to connect” to China |
The new US embassy in Beijing, opening in August, will include art by Jeff Koons, Cai Guo-Qiang, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Rauschenberg, and others
Jeff Koons is lending his sculpture Tulips, an edition of which is shown here in the courtyard of the Nord/LB bank in Hanover, Germany, to the US embassy in Beijing for ten years
By Jason Edward Kaufman | 8.5.08
THE ART NEWSPAPER
NEW YORK. When the new American embassy opens in Beijing just before the start of the summer Olympics in August, it will display work by at least 18 American and Chinese contemporary artists, including Jeff Koons, Cai Guo-Qiang, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Rausch-enberg, Betty Woodman, Martin Puryear, Maya Lin, Yun-Fei Ji, and Hai Bo. Many of the pieces are new commissions or site-specific works purchased by the State Department.
The collection has been overseen by Virginia Shore, chief curator of the Art in Embassies programme. The State Department calculates its art budgets based on a building’s square footage, and the $800,000 spent for art on the Beijing project is the largest sum ever for a US embassy.
Ms Shore says she strove to be “culturally sensitive and diplomatic” in selecting American and Chinese artists. She says that when she commissioned new work, she asked some artists “to connect” to China, “but without giving any specific parameters”. When she requested one of Cai Guo-Qiang’s exploded gunpowder drawings he responded with Eagle Landing on a Pine Branch, 2007, which his spokeswoman describes as “an American symbol about to land on a Chinese archetype”. Very few works allude to contemporary events, and those that do are subject to alternative interpretations. For example, a traditional Chinese-style landscape painting by Yun-Fei Ji, Last Days Before the Flood, 2006, portrays refugees from the Three Gorges dam project.
All of the works belong to the State Department with the exception of Jeff Koons’s steel sculpture Tulips, a ten-year loan from the artist that will be installed outdoors. Sculptures by Ellsworth Kelly, Martin Puryear, Louise Bourgeois and Mark di Suvero have been donated by the Friends of Art and Preservation in Embassies, a non-profit organisation that helps acquire art for display in US diplomatic buildings.
The new $550m complex, designed by the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, is one of the two largest construction projects ever undertaken by the State Department on foreign soil. (The embassy currently under construction in Baghdad will be larger.)
The works will be installed shortly before the building is unveiled on 8 August in a ceremony to be attended by President Bush and the First Lady, who will be in the Chinese capital to attend the opening of the Olympics.
Ms Shore declines to reveal how much the State Department paid for individual works, but says that artists and dealers agreed to prices within the constraints of her budget. ......《more》 |
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| May-04-2008 |
| Exhibition: ID - identification of the new generation |
By making specific identification, try to prove their self-existences.
In May, AKI Gallery is proud to dedicate the co-exhibition, ”ID identification of the new generation”, which will gather four young but excellent artists, Hua, Chien-Chiang, Chou, Chu-Wang, Lo, Chan-Peng and Huang, Pei-Hang. The works convey their self-symbolic figures.
With the subjective aspect, People define whether a substance exists, according to the relation between it and others. Therefore, people suppose something to be or not to be extremely relying on various conditions and identifications which can be recognized.
Through the role that one plays, community that one belongs to, connection with ones habitat, all these identification help a person locating on the intricate net of interpersonal relationship. As anchoring in the endless sea of time and space, these terms/labels build up the contour of abstract concept, self-existence.
Another self-portrait: Hua, Chien-Chiang
After showing his solo exhibition in Taipei Fine Art Museum 2007, Hua, Chien-Chiang had a long stay at Headlands Art Center in San Francisco. The exhibition,” ID”, will display his latest paintings drawn in
Headlands. The layered texture and bright colours are still characteristic of his works. The figures, which repeatedly appears in many of the paintings, is the projection of the painter’s self image. By means of creating a symbol of self image, Hua has comically but incisively recorded his life’s feelings.
Where I exist: Chou, Chu-Wang
In Chou, Chu-Wang’s sandstone series, the artist has shown an attitude not much unlike that of a middle age north European one, which has a scrupulous pursuit of details. These seemingly infinite grooves have already surpassed a mere insistence of recording facts; rather, they seem more comparable to some practice of philosophy or inner thoughts. Chou’s work “impish kids” has won the top award in 2007 Taipei Fine Arts Award. Through observing all kinds of vivid expressions of children and the meticulously insistence of recording the external world, Chou has revealed to the viewers that “This is where I exist”.
The paradoxical sense of belonging: Lo, Chan-Peng
The young artist Lo, Chan-Peng is the top winner of the recent Kaohsung Arts Award, since September of 2007 his series of diary from the strawberry generation has been gaining acclaims from critics. Similar to the realism from Chuck Close’s photos, the special visual sensations from Lo’s photos, such as compressed, shallow depth of field; sweet, almost sugary colour contrast; all these has highlighted the special attributes possessed by digital imaginary. He is not only meticulously observing his own generation as an objective outsider, but also has positioned himself as an artist within such a sub-culture.
The shift of self-consciousness: Huang, Pei-Hang
Huang, Pei-Hang has just won the top award in Chi Mei Art Cultivation Awards, this proves her work is more than just superficial. English critic John Berger (1926-) has written in his famous book “Way of seeing”, “When a man stares at a woman, the woman sees herself being stared at”. The female’s image exists in the act of watching, this means the female subject is not only an object of the viewer, but also the viewing sight, it is a conflicting body within which the viewer and viewee co-exists simultaneously. Within this process of the subject body moving in, Huang has painted the how the character of females exist under this society’s stares, being watched constantly. ......《more》 |
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| May-02-2008 |
| Exhibition: The 6th Taishin Arts Award Exhibition |
Galerie Grand Siecle and Taiwan Contemporary Art Link are delighted to announce our artist Kuo I Chen, who nominated the 2008 Taishin Arts Award. And an official exhibition for these artists is showing at Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei from 26 April to 15 June.
After the Earth was destroyed, human beings send from a distant planet a probe vehicle “Survivor” back to the Earth to find if there is any signal of life. In the images transmitted, we see the ruins from actual disasters of our world: 911 attack, tsunami of South Asia, Hurricane Katrina hit, Gulf War, air crashes, etc. By rearranging digital images, surreal scenes of the future ruins are constructed.
Survivor Project《X》, 200x94cm Digital Print .Light Box. 2007
The 6th Taishin Arts Award Exhibition
Exhibition Date ：2008.04.26 ~2008.06.15
Exhibition Place：Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei
Website: MOCA Taipei
Related Link: http://www.taiwancontemporaryart.net/comments.php?artid=190 ......《more》 |
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| May-01-2008 |
| Exhibition: The Two –way City |
Galerie Grand Siecle and Taiwan Contemporary Art Link are pleased to announce our artists Huang Hsin Chien in National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, from 23 March to 18 May 2008.
Passage，Digital interactive installation，2005
The Two –way City
Subject: The pedestrians and The Dissection of City
Place: digiark & Gallery E
Opening: 2008/3/23
Exhibition: digiark 2008/3/23-6/30
Gallery E 2008/3/23-5/18
The Pedestrians – Emerging Digital Arts from Taiwan
Chung-Kun Wang , Chun-Chiang Niu, Ming-Hsueh Lee, Chun¬-ming Chi, An-Chih Tsai, Huang Hsin Chien
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| May-01-2008 |
| Exhibition: Feigning Movement III |
Feign Your Movement to Join the Game
Here, you see neither any of the famous curators nor a huge amount of sponsors overflowing the space of flyers. But, you can definitely see the passion of 7 young artists who are still studying in the Graduate School of Art and Technology at Taipei National University of the Arts. Based on the dream that “once for a while, hopefully we can get together, sharing with each other what we are is working on,” they organized the group <Feigning Movement> a couple years ago. The third one in the series will be the last show while these artists are still registered as students. In addition to the original members, the 2007 Taipei Arts Award Winner Su Yu-Hsien (Sam Su, the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts at Tainan National University of the Arts) will be the new member in the third edition of <Feigning Movement>. The exhibited works include video-art, sound installation, and photo-prints, altogether challenging the pre-existing sensory experience of spectators.
Following the attempts from the previous two years, <Feigning Movement III> is an exhibition with its own history. It includes a conversation with the first and the second editions. Moreover, it represents an unexpected jump which does not locate in any of the linear dialogue.
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