Posts tagged Chinese art
Weng Chen: Chinese Digital and Watercolor Artist in Seattle
Mar 13th
At the March First Thursday Art Walk in Pioneer Square, I discovered Seattle artist Weng Chen of Studio Wonn, who is originally from China. I really like her visual aesthetic, and her work is quite inexpensive.
"Night Market" - Giclée print on matte paper
Her work at her studio during First Thursday was primarily Giclée prints and watercolors. On display at her studio is an explanation of her Giclée creation process, which always starts with hand-drawing on paper.
Four Beijing Art Festivals and Fairs Happening Now
Apr 17th
These are a busy couple of weeks for the arts in Beijing. From this past Wednesday to next weekend, the city will host no fewer than four major visual and performing arts festivals and fairs.
Wednesday, April 15 to Sunday, April 19
7:30 p.m. each night
Oriental Pioneer Theater
80 RMB (student price 40 RMB) per night
LDTX, Beijing’s biggest modern dance group, presents 50 original works over the course of the festival. The program is different every night.
Order tickets online here.
Thursday, April 16 to Sunday, April 19
10 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day but Sunday, which is 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Agricultural Exhibition Center
50 RMB per day
Contemporary art galleries from all over the world come to Beijing to promote themselves. Includes special project exhibitions such as Mapping Asia.
Friday, April 17 to Tuesday, May 3
Venues and times vary
Fat Art is a multimedia festival involving sight, sound and film surrounding a “fat” theme. It includes an exhibition at Today Art Museum that lasts until May 13.
Sunday, April 26 to Thursday, April 30
Agricultural Exhibition Center
10 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day but Thursday, which is 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Art Beijing also has galleries visiting from all over the world. Its main difference from China International Gallery Exposition is its scope of activities that includes art education and forum discussions.
To learn about future Chinese contemporary art events, read the Red Box Review.
Not Your Average Fashion Show
Dec 16th
This past Sunday, I finally made it to the exhibition “Christian Dior and Chinese Artists” at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing’s 798. I had heard it was great but was skeptical. Was this exhibition going to be one big, classless advertisement for Dior? Fashion has an obvious connection to art made public by many museums, so how was this unique?
My answer: The exhibition is about the two-way relationship of Dior to Chinese culture and art. Chinese art, architecture and culture has influenced the brand since the 1940s. Additionally, several famous artists have used Dior as inspiration or subject matter; the exhibition includes two portraits painted from ash of Christian Dior as well as a sculpture inspired by a Dior dress displayed next to it.
The exhibition’s currating and therefore layout are brilliant. The exhibition’s base design is rooms and hallways of mirror walls with woodenand mirror floors, bamboo and grass. You cannot walk all the way around most of the dresses; instead the mirrors force you to see different views of the same dress several minutes apart from one another.
A couple direct quotes from my colleagues about this exhibition:
“People from all over the world are going to queue [line up] to see it.” – My supervisor Hortense Halle
“It’s the best exhibition I’ve ever seen in my life.” – My coworker Francois
798 Art District Highlights – November 29, 2008
Nov 30th
My new language partner and I took a short but sweet visit to 798 yesterday in which I saw a lot of art that was inspiring enough to blog about.
Probably the most respected gallery in 798, Long March Space, is in the middle of an exhibition titled “Impossible is Nothing“, named after the famous Adidas advertising slogan related to the Olympics. This exhibition is both respectable and avante guard, consisting of a life-size part of a space shuttle that people live in while in space and a small earth, both hanging from the gallery’s largest room’s ceiling in the dark. There’s also four security camera monitors, which brings to light that people in space spend all their time on camera.
The other exhibition I hadn’t seen yet at Long March Space was “The Starving of Sudan”, an installation and video of an earlier performing inside the installation. The performance’s purpose was to recreate a famous photograph in Darfur where a vulture waits for a child to die. Seeing Chinese art on this issue was a relief as many Chinese people are extremely apathetic about Darfur, and their government plays a large role in the conflict.
Artside Beijing, a Korean company’s relatively new Beijing gallery, usually shows the most famous artists in East Asia. The gallery is currently hosting a solo exhibition by Oh Sufan, world renowned for using Western oil painting techniques to paint “modern calligraphy” as the gallery calls it. My language partner and I had a fun time identifying the occasionally legible Chinese character.
Galleria Continua, Gallery TN and Tang Contemporary Art are located right next to each other and are three of my favorites in Beijing.
Yesterday was my second visit to Galleria Continua‘s “Mumbai: A Laundry Field,” and I appreciated it even more the second time. I now understand the artist was inspired by and wanted to portray the contrast of beautiful textiles with the dreary urban landscape in Mumbai.
I discovered a new favorite artist yesterday at Gallery TN, Ren Rong. Some of his work blends cultural subject matter in a way that makes it difficult to tell from far away that he is Chinese. He also plays a lot with Chairman Mao and The Forbidden City’s iconography.
Tang Contemporary Art opened its solo “Target” exhibition yesterday, the second exhibitoin in which I’ve seen this space take advantage of its high ceiling; the first was “International Kebab.” This exhibition features a huge sculpture of Mao sharp-shooting in the same dark room as a video with portrait dimensions. His “Two Soldiers” was an excellent mirror-image oil painting, mural-like in nature.
What Fuels My Passion – My First Visit to UCCA (Finally)
Sep 2nd
Every once in a while I have an experience that reminds me why I want to work for arts clients. My visit to the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) on an unusual Friday off was one of them. Most of the works in the current exhibition made me smile, some made me nearly cry, and even fewer made me grimace. Overall, this art center is a reminder of the positive effects of globalization and art’s vital role in society.
UCCA is considered China’s first nonprofit art organization. Its founders and some of its upper management are foreign, but almost all the art is Chinese, and all of it is contemporary. It’s the only organization in Beijing’s 798 Art Zone to charge admission, but every Thursday is free, and I went during the end of a period about two weeks long of free admission every day in celebration of the Olympics. The bulk of the current work comes from the personal collection of Guy and Myriam Ullens, the center’s founders. Most of its art is from really famous artists, so it inspires to me to see this work available for viewing and experiencing in such a publicly accessible way.
I almost had a heart attack when I discovered “Bloodline Series – Family Portrait 1” by Zhang Xiaogang tucked away in the main exhibition room’s corner. This series will probably be as famous as Andy Warhol’s portraits someday, if it isn’t already. Unlike most of the other fragile work by famous artists at UCCA, it was hung at eye level, making it vulnerable to vandalism, both unintentional and intentional.
I maintain that because Chinese people like to touch visual art much more than I’m used to, good artists who create art for Chinese visitors make it interactive. To enter the exhibition, visitors go through “Space Time Tunnel” by Wang Du, the same artist who created “International Kebab,” my favorite exhibition I’ve seen in 798. Its entrance contains a claustrophobia disclaimer with directions to an alternate entrance. One of my favorite Chinese artists, Cao Fei, made a Second Life world called “RMB City” that is a futuristic combination of famous buildings in all Chinese cities that visitors can explore on a computer.
UCCA may also be one of the best places in Beijing for tourists to shop. I wish I could buy all my postcards there, but alas, they are quite pricey: 10元 (currently about $1.50) each. I may reserve UCCA postcards for family members.
Have you ever had an experience with art that inspired you personally or professionally? Please tell!
Beijing’s Largest Art District’s Take on the Olympics
Aug 14th
I knew sports and entertainment public relations were similar – both involve obtaining sponsorships and managing perceptions of personalities, for starters. But I had failed to notice the direct connection the Olympics has with the arts. This is especially apparent to me, as I work in and live right by the Beijing 798 Art Zone, which has been compared to New York’s SoHo.
In terms of how this affects my daily life, my neighborhood, despite its distance from any major Olympic venues, is clad in Olympic fever. Every shop directly across the street from the 798
The entire city is flooded with tourists, my work, T Space, being no exception. It seems like every gallery in 798 but mine is presenting an Olympic-themed exhibition; however, everyone has a different take on presenting the Olympics. Galleria Continua’s response is to host “Unmoved,” which forces you to take longer than you usually would to look at works in a
And why wouldn’t they? The New York Times reported that the Olympics will bring 10,000 guests a day to 798, three times the typical number. One of my coworkers told me that half the diplomats visiting
Media coverage of 798 shortly before the Olympics:
New York Times
Have you observed any connections between art and sports? What are your thoughts on art’s relationship to the Olympics? I welcome your comments.
Chinese Contemporary Art Links
Jul 3rd
Most of what I’ve been doing since I started my job in 798 a little over a week ago is making my way through a 12-page, single-spaced list of Web sites related to Chinese contemporary art that my boss provided me with. I’d like to share some of my favorite artists and art organizations. This likely will become a regular post topic, and maybe I’ll come up with themes, such as favorite photography. Contemporary art mavens likely are already familiar with these links.
In this post: artists Cao Fei 曹斐, Zhang Huan 張洹, Hong Hao 洪浩, Feng Jincao, and Qian Gang; art gallery 1918 ArtSpace; and the consulting business China Creative Connections.
Cao Fei 曹斐 specializes in new media, and works in a variety of visual art genres. A lot of her work is colorful and reminds me of high-fashion advertisements.
Zhang Huan 張洹 is an accomplished artist born in Beijing who lives in New York. He works in variety of media but I’m pretty sure he’s most famous for his nude performance art made during the 1990s. I saw a photograph of his performance To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain at the Seattle Art Museum last summer. His work is depressing but ingenious.
Hong Hao 洪浩 created several installations with “my things” in their titles. The image above, “My Things About Circle No. 2,” is currently my computer’s wallpaper.
Feng Jincao created a series of paintings titled “Scenery in a Chinese Dress.” I really like these, as all of them are purposefully not-quite-mirror images. Many of them look like modified Rorschach test cards.
Among other works, Qian Gang creates two-tone black-and-white silkscreens that contain cartoon-like illustration.
Organizational links:
1918 ArtSpace in Shanghai has a great Web site; you can spend hours looking at the art on there. The gallery mostly exhibits Chinese artists with a few exceptions.
China Creative Connections in Beijing, founded by an advertising executive, is a consulting firm to connect art and business through opportunities such as exhibit sponsorship and visual art buying for offices.
What are your favorite Chinese contemporary art links? Which is your favorite out of the ones in this post? Feel free to comment.
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