Art Stage Singapore Report – India

The Personal and Collective voice
of Indian Contemporary Art

By Arvind Vijaymohan*
Fueled by the drastic changesin India’s socio-economic and political landscape in the 80s, a unique visual expression emerged in the form of the Indian contemporary art movement. Till today, the exploration of the individual and the collective amidst a backdrop of India’s current socio-economic affairs continues to have a strong presence in the works of Indian contemporary artists.

Subodh Gupta
Hungry God
Installation 2005
Stainless steel utensils
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of Gallery Nature Morte

Overview of present-day situation
Indian modern-day art is primarily classified into two periods: the modern and the contemporary. The modern movement emerged following India’s independence in 1947, though it had taken roots a few years prior to it. Its origin was marked by a period of uninhibited freedom of creative expression which witnessed the formation of a number of  artist groups and associations. The general mandate of these groups was to redefine the visual language, as it had existed under the British rule in pre-independent India. The most prominent initiative of this period was the Bombay Progressive Artist’s Group that was founded by F. N. Souza in 1947, and its members over the years, till it’s dissolution in 1956 included S. H. Raza, M. F. Husain, Akbar Padamsee, Krishen Khanna, Tyeb Mehta and V. S. Gaitonde – some of the mostpowerful exponents of Indian modernism. Some of the other leading modernists include Bhupen Khakhar, J Swaminathan, Jehangir Sabavala, Jogen Chowdhury, K. G. Subramanyan, Manjit Bawa and Ram Kumar.

The origin of the contemporary Indian art movement can be traced to the late 1980s. This period witnessed an emergence of younger talent that was motivated by a stream of concerns that were far removed from those of the modernists. In the decade leading up to the turn of the millennium, India witnessed a monumental ascent in its economic and technological sectors, which further led to a significant shift in its social and political fabric. The liberalization of the Indian economy in the early 90s, followed by a proliferation of popular mainstream culture played a major catalyst, fueling the imagination of the contemporaries and in their developing a unique visual expression. Adding a higher dimension to the fresh, edgy content was the artists’ inclination towards employing a wide array of hitherto unexplored mediums including performance, installation, conceptual, video and new media art.

Who’s who in Contemporary Indian art?
Alwar Balasubramaniam (1971)
The poetic dialogue between shadow, form and perspective plays an integral role in Balasubramaniam’s works. His installations, in spite of occupying a defined form tend to transcend their physicality on account of this subtle and delicate interplay. The most powerful aspect of Bala’s work is its innate, illusionary ability to lead the viewer to question identity and the concept of self, and its role in minutiae as well as the macrocosmic.

Anita Dube (1958)
Exploring the concept of loss and renewal, both at an individual and collective level, Dube’s installations use a wide selection of media ranging from plastic, ceramic eyes, human bones, wire, velvet, thread and dentures. She has over the last two decades created a deeply personal language, rendered powerfully using found objects and sculptural installations to study and represent the biased position of individuals, particularly women.
Atul Dodiya (1959) One of the archetypal Indian contemporaries, Dodiya’s practice has included hyperrealist paintings on canvas, installations, delicate watercolors and ‘combines’, works which assimilate his painting alongside, or on the surface of the installations itself – most popularly in the form of his ‘metal roller-shutter’ works. This sought-after medium enables Dodiya to present a dual-layered message; one that a viewer notices at first glance, and the second on an underlying surface that is revealed when the shutter is raised. He also suffuses humor, subtly as well as in a brazen manner within his narrative. Dodiya adopts a flight from reality within his works, creating at times fascinating parallel histories, richly strewn with imagined encounters between iconic figures from world art, politics and popular culture.

Bharti Kher (1969)
While a parcel of Kher’s practice, specifically her bindi-works on flat surfaces does not necessarily present a definitive message, her installations address concerns encompassing hybridity, identity, social norms and conditioning, evolution and tradition. The bindi, a decorative dot worn traditionally by married women on the forehead, has become a somewhat constant medium of Kher’s choice. She has created highly vibrant, large-format pictures by off-setting and intermingling bindis of multiple hues and shapes, in formations of swirls, circles, geometric as well as in a seemingly random order. Her most iconic works are life-scale sculptures including amongst others an elephant keeling over; the heart of a whale; an antlered, undressed Amazonian beauty; a snarling hyena; a fallen wishing tree; all of which reflect upon the complexities of reality, imagined as well as factual along side that of identity, personal and collective.

Dayanita Singh (1961)
Amongst India’s most prominent photographers, Singh’s work, predominantly in black-andwhite has captured candid as well as staged portraits of hundreds of Indian families from the urbane, upper strata; in the process creating not solely a profoundly moving visual archive of generations of a family in the same frame but that of them juxtaposed against the spaces they inhabit. She forayed into the domain of shooting in colour relatively recently, and this fresh body of work captured industrial spaces and buildings.

Jitish Kallat (1974)
One of the most articulate artists of his generation, Kallat plays an ambassadorial role representing the face of contemporary Indian art across the world art scene. His vision has been represented, typically in large-scale dimensions, across a broad range of media including installations, paintings, photographs, lenticular prints and video art. Mumbai, the city he lives and works in is a constant leitmotif, with its people, culture, architecture and materials playing protagonist – reflecting the aspirations, contradictions, agony, acceptance, resilience and joy of the oft-battered city and its residents, sometimes singularly as also in a teeming mass. His visually striking works present a fascinating narrative, that of marginalized vagrants, hybridized mech-animals, mutated in a Transformers-like shell; who despite their apparent unattractiveness are hard not to be drawn towards, primarily on account of their glossy, super-sleek presentation.

N. S. Harsha (1969)
A winner of the 2008 Artes Mundi Prize, Harsha’s realistic, detailed paintings and watercolours are stylistically reminiscent of traditional miniatures, though presented on an incomparably larger scale. His works feature multiple characters, collectively participating in a narrative that could cover social, political or economic commentary. Within the boundaries of his work, Harsha can deftly connect unrelated subjects, in order to highlight the apparent irony in the state of current socio-economic affairs, with singularly specific interest in India and its people. His practice has also included site-specific installations as well as ambitious group participative projects.

Ranbir Kaleka (1953)
A unique, masterly ability to juxtapose and fuse the age-old painterly tradition with the
contemporary medium of motional video imagery is what makes Kaleka’s practice so highly regarded. His trans-media works in particular reflect the artist’s concern for precision. A painted surface is introduced to a series of projected images, en route rendering a third dimension which magically breathes life into the painted characters, completely mesmerizing the viewer in the process. His practice has included detailed surrealistic paintings and dream-scaped digital collages that combine the quotidian with the fantastical.

Riyas Komu (1971)
An artist with a strong political perspective, Komu’s practice employs painting, photography and sculpture to build the visual of a complex and contrarian case against the popular perceived image of India. Supporting the commoner, in some cases read as the downtrodden, Komu’s work draws attention to the existing socio-economic extremities in the country. The alarming, inherent contradictions are brought to the fore through his recurring subjects which include portraits of individuals, rendered in a claustrophobic close-up and the motif of footballers who are emblematic of the rigors and joy of life itself – weathering victory and loss, success and failure, all in the same wave.

Sheba Chachi (1958)
Sheba Chhachhi works with lens based images, both still and moving, investigating questions of gender, ecology, violence and visual culture. Her works address the question of transformation, personal and collective memory, retrieving the marginal, and the play between the mythic and social. A long time chronicler of the women’s movement in India, as both photographer and activist, she began developing collaborative, staged photographic portraits with her subjects in the early 90’s. In her large installations, Chhachhi places the photographic image in space with video, sound, light, objects, and text. She has developed a new artistic language, that of the moving image light box, which uses a series of still and moving layers of photographic images to almost cinematic effect. Public art interventions are an important part of Chhachhi’s practice. She creates immersive installations and interactive video experiences in diverse public spaces.

Shilpa Gupta (1976)
An inter-disciplinary artist, Shilpa employs a wide range of media including photographs, interactive video, sound, websites, performances and objects to explore globally valid concerns including security, religion, politics, borders and boundaries, culture and human rights. The scale of her works can range from immersive, wherein the viewer plays an integral, interactive function in completing the piece, to far more intimate objects which may strike a viewer for their whimsy sheen yet effect them deeply on grounds of their pertinent context.

Subodh Gupta (1964)
The power of Gupta’s practice lies in his apparent ease in creating attractive yet meaningful installations, using a wholly commonplace media, which despite its ubiquity is powerfully transformed when viewed in capacity of an art-object. Though Gupta’s works are typically defined by a strong Indian sub-text, they yet are globally valid and relevant idioms. In addition, his Duchampian inclination towards ‘readymades’, typically drawn from the most humble Indian settings which address concerns of a socio-economic and political nature have significantly strengthened his position in the critical as well as popular connoisseurship circle. Beyond installations, his practice has included painting, photography, performance and video.

Sudharshan Shetty (1961)
Though Shetty’s practice has included paintings, video and performance, his most definitive works are large-scale installations of a kinetic nature. Though seemingly playful on initial glance, these works have an underlying, introspective context that could address a wide range concerns ranging from sadness to darkness to denial. He has a natural ability to transform inanimate objects into metaphors, in part by using the very element which a viewer finds interesting to begin with: the monotonous, repetitious machinations and sound of the objects; as also by juxtaposing two seemingly discordant forms, with their respective physicality: picture a monumental, steel-frame dinosaur making love to a vintage Jaguar car; a leader on the verge of toppling from his pedestal, tethered in place by a coin-collecting receptacle; a packed display cabinet, with the shelved objects bleeding, as though for the benefit of the viewer.

L.N. Tallur (1971)
Presenting an earnest rendition of a deprived, impoverished rural India through his ambitious sculptural pieces, Tallur stands out as a rare artist for having successfully parlayed India’s socio-cultural concerns and milieu into the larger stream of contemporary art. His work, derived from a deep-rooted personal context refers to the richly diverse, traditional life of agrarian communities in rural India. The juxtaposition of elements, seemingly contradictory that raise pertinent concerns of a global order form an integral part of his practice.

T. V. Santhosh (1968)
Originally trained in sculpture, Santhosh’s practice largely comprises paintings that present imagery pertaining to polemic content including terrorism and war with the visuals derived from general media sources, specifically news-channel footage. Disturbing images of terrorists, army generals, assembled religious gatherings and mutilated, maimed figures amongst others are presented by the artist in an extremely attractive, solarized palette of yellow, green, purple and orange, thereby thoroughly diffusing the initial reaction of the viewer, which logically should be that of a grimace. Instead, the viewer finds himself drawn to the work on account of its visual beauty, largely unconcerned at this stage about the underlying content.

Emerging artists

• Aditya Pande
• Chitra Ganesh
• Kiran Subbaiah
• Minam Apang
• Neha Choksi
• Nikhil Chopra
• Remen Chopra
• Rohini Devasher
• Sakshi Gupta
• Shreyas Karle
• Vibha Galhotra
• Varunika Saraf

Diaspora art
The importance of diaspora art, essentially referring to work created by artists based around the globe whose roots can be traced to India. In most cases, diaspora artists were relocated internationally at a very young age, or were born overseas. Their visual language is a unique amalgamation of Indian values and aesthetics, based upon their contemporary international environment and upbringing. Their work addresses a wide gamut of social, religious, genderbased and political concerns covering personal identity, inheritance, dislocation, cultural complexities and hybridity and the powerful role played by memory. The flux of tradition and modernity is apparent in their work that covers a range of media including painting, installations and sculpture, photography, digital and video art. Anish Kapoor and Raqib Shaw are amongst the leading diaspora artists, while others include Gautam Kansara, Rina Banerjee, the Singh Twins and Chitra Ganesh amongst others.

Private institutions in India
The lack of public art institutions within the Indian domain has been a long-standing concern, but over the last 5 years, the emergence of private museums seems to have alleviated the situation to a great extent. Similar projects and initiatives in various cities including Kolkata, Fort Kochi and Coimbatore are suggestive of a fast widening template of public level art initiatives.

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
This museum houses the personal collection of Mrs. Kiran Nadar of the HCL family, comprising over 300 works by an eclectic mix of modernists, contemporaries and emerging talent. The selection on display capably represents the essential visual trajectories in the history of post-independence Indian art; one can view signature works by all the leading artists including Husain, Souza, Rameshwar Broota, Raqib Shaw, Raza, Tyeb Mehta, Sudhir Patwardhan, Anish Kapoor, Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Alwar Balasubramaniam and Ranjani Shettar among others.

The Devi Art Foundation
India’s first private contemporary art museum, the Devi Art Foundation was opened as a two store exhibition space in 2008 by mother and son duo, Lekha and Anupam Poddar. The Poddar collection is home to over 5,000 pieces of Indian tribal, folk, modernist and contemporary art. Amongst the primary objectives of the Foundation is to create a platform which fosters meaningful interactions between artists in the subcontinent so as to elevate the understanding of a common history, while simultaneously facilitating the public engagement with art. In the period since its inception, the foundation has mounted 7 exhibitions, addressing a diverse range of concerns representing artists from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka amongst others.

Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum
The oldest museum in Mumbai, this beautifully restored institution showcases a fine and decorative arts collection including dioramas that document the culture of different communities in the city in the 19th and early 20th century. It has, in the recent years, proven to be the perfect foil for a series of contemporary exhibitions. The juxtaposition of contemporary works by Sudarshan Shetty, Jitish Kallat and recently, Sheba Chachi against the painstakingly restored interiors of the Museum has resulted in exhibitions of a genuinely world-class caliber.

KHOJ
A part of the Triangle Arts Trust, the Khoj International Artists’ Association was started in 1997. It is an artist-led, alternative space meant to promote experimentation and cross-cultural exchange initiatives within India, apart from developing forms of art including performance, video, environmental, public and sound. Since its inception, its residencies have included multi-disciplinary artists from over 20 countries who have worked alongside Indian peers, leading to a rich cross-pollination of thoughts and ideas.

*The author is a leading Indian art advisor and has significant experience in building comprehensive collections of Indian art. He specializes in sourcing, negotiating and acquiring museumstandard modernist and contemporary Indian artworks and objects.

Art Stage Singapore Report – Japan

Japanese Contemporary Art

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From Emergence to Global Recognition

By Darryl Wee*
The birth of Japanese contemporary art was of humble beginnings, brought about by the inuences of Western art movements. Since then, Japanese contemporary artworks have managed to retain a strong Japanese identity while incorporating a western-inuenced aesthetic, quickly gaining international visibility in the contemporary art scene today.

Yoshitomo Nara + graf
Yogya Bintang House Mini, 2008,
Mixed media, 340 x 390 x 420 cm
Yuz Foundation Collection

The early days of Japanese contemporary art
A useful starting point for tracing the history of Japanese contemporary art is Tokyo Gallery, often considered to be Japan’s rst dedicated contemporary art gallery. Established in 1950, the gallery played an instrumental role in introducing Japanese audiences to foreign artistic movements in America and Europe, as well as maintaining links with Japanese artists living and working abroad. This was a fertile period of exchange between Japanese and foreign artists and critics: Michel Tapié’s ideas on French art informel and critical writings on American Abstract Expressionism were widely disseminated in Japan, for instance.

Some important movements that emerged from this era include the Osaka-based Gutai Art
Association led by Jiro Yoshihara, and artists from the Mono-ha (literally, “school of things”) group, which proposed an art that was based on the spatial relations between objects, brushstrokes and materials. Action painting and works with a strong bodily character, including Happenings, became prominent new trends, and experimental crossover activity across visual art, theater, photography, music and lm prevailed among the Tokyo and Osaka avantgarde. Some of these artists, including painter Natsuyuki Nakanishi and photographer Takuma Nakahira, and graphic artist and animator Keiichi Tanaami are still prominent and active today.

Other seminal Japanese artists from this period found their stride while living and working in New York, associating with conceptual artists and members of the Fluxus movement. On Kawara, who has been based in the city since 1965, began creating his renowned Today series of paintings during this time, and Yoko Ono showed her rst “instruction” pieces at galleries in both New York and Tokyo, in addition to serving as a link between art circles in the two cities.

Fast forward to the 1990s, an exuberant time for consumer and pop culture in Japan, despite the ocial collapse of the bubble economy. Often dubbed the era of “Saison culture” – a reference to the way in which Japanese department stores like Parco and Seibu functioned as art patrons by setting up museums within their shopping complexes – the mid 90s celebrated pop, underground culture, and manga- or anime-inuenced stylings that showed up in the early work of Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara. The young Tomio Koyama, who had been working for the established dealer Masami Shiraishi at SCAI the Bathhouse, left the gallery and took both Murakami and Nara with him to open his own gallery in Tokyo, representing them at US art fairs in Hollywood and Los Angeles, where the gallerists Tim Blum and Je Poe also began selling their works to local collectors. As critic Adrian Favell has pointed out, this early LA connection proved crucial to the subsequent global reception of both artists – the “Superat” show that gave its name to an entire current of Japanese contemporary art was held at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in 2001, for example.

Overview of current situation
Takashi Murakami’s eorts to revitalize what he sees as a stodgy art system centered around elite art colleges and a tortuous route towards recognition can perhaps best be seen at GEISAI, a open-call art festival rst held in 2002. Young painters like Akane Koide, scouted by Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki Gallery at GEISAI in 2006, have found commercial success through this route. Both GEISAI and Kaikai Kiki also have outposts in Taipei, where Japanese art and culture enjoys perhaps the warmest welcome in Asia.

Murakami’s conviction that young Japanese artists lack a clear sense of their place in society has also driven him to become a personal mentor to a cohort of assistants and disciples at the Kaikai Kiki Miyoshi Factory in Saitama, outside Tokyo. His rst assistant-cum-protégé, Mr., is now a well-known artist in his own right, working with themes related to Japan’s otaku (nerd/geek) culture and young girls in sexually charged and often pedophilic contexts.

This past year (2011) turned out to be a signicant year for Japanese contemporary art in
terms of both international visibility and historical reappraisal. Lee Ufan, one of the founding members of the Mono-ha movement, had his rst US museum show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in June, while the Pompidou Center in Paris mounted a retrospective of Yayoi Kusama, who also received a thoughtful survey of her early performance-based work at Tokyo’s Watari-Um Museum this past summer.

It was the Japan Society in New York, however, which oered the most up-to-date sample of
the current zeitgeist in Japanese contemporary art. “Bye Bye Kitty!!!”, a long overdue survey of 16 younger and mid-career artists curated by David Elliott, reected Japan’s relative sobriety and sense of social malaise in comparison with the growth and exuberance of China and the rest of Asia.

Makoto Aida, who featured prominently at this show, is perhaps the leading – and certainly the most provocative – contemporary artist of his generation. Aida is both an accomplished, classically trained Japanese nihonga painter and an ironic prankster whose work combines delicacy and brutality in equal measure. His expansive canvases depict a myriad of subjects: wonderlands of frolicking schoolgirls, huge contingents of salarymen getting pulped to death in giant blenders, and Japanese Zero ghter planes launching a retributive strike on New York City as payback for Pearl Harbor.

Other leading contemporary exponents of this neo-nihonga aesthetic include Akira Yamaguchi, whose fantastical urban landscapes portray a hypothetical, retro-modern Japan where tile-roofed streetscapes huddle next to shopping complexes outtted with both high-tech conveniences and traditional rural comforts. Hisashi Tenmyouya plays similarly with this traditional-modern dialectic, and Tomoko Konoike creates traditional folding screen paintings focusing on wolves and other animals with spiritual or mystical associations.

Contemporary sculptors who have recently risen to prominence include Kohei Nawa and
Motohiko Odani. Nawa’s sculptures consist of taxidermized animals and other objects coated in translucent “pix-cell” beads, giving them a surface that approximates the way in which digital technologies distort, magnify and enhance our visual environment. Odani explores themes of mutation and transformation through pieces that are both nely wrought and contorted at the same time.

Japan’s strengths in photography are embodied by senior artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, who combines multimedia installations incorporating found objects and Japanese antiquities with serene monochrome landscapes and panoramas. Daido Moriyama, now into his 70s, uses grainy contrast and o-focus framing to lend his images a raw energy, mirroring the restlessness of the turbulent streets that he loves to haunt. Nobuyoshi Araki has attracted much infamy for works depicting bondage scenes and erotic fetishes, but is also respected for his series of intimate portraits documenting the life of his late wife, Yoko, and a long-running documentary obssession with the urban landscapes of his native Tokyo. Naoya Hatakeyama and Toshio Shibata are respected masters of the landscape genre, casting an impassive eye on both urban and natural environments. Tomoko Yoneda and Yuki Kimura are known for more conceptual work that explores issues of representation and framing, as well as photography as an index and document.

Finally, several senior Japanese artists working mainly with large-scale installations have
been based abroad for an extended period, where they have found greater creative and logistical freedom, as well as a more receptive and critical audience than they would have received at home. The best examples include Tatzu Nishi, who has been based in Germany for more than two decades producing work for Sculpture Project Münster and other European art festivals; Tadashi Kawamata, a Paris-based artist whose outdoor huts, bridges and walkways crafted from plywood have been showcased at Documenta and various biennales; New Yorkbased Mariko Mori, whose recent projects visualize cosmic and metaphysical phenomena using immaculate surfaces and industrially-fabricated materials; and Berlin-based Chiharu Shiota, whose sprawling installations made from salvaged wooden doors, labyrinthine tangles of thread and other unwieldy materials are partially inspired by her experiences studying with performance art legend Marina Abramovic.

Important institutions
Museums
Postwar Japan’s meteoric rise as an economic superpower culminated in a construction boom in art-related infrastructure during the buoyant 80s. This was paired with a growing trend in corporate arts patronage, centered on private museums with lavish collections consisting primarily of European painting, especially works of French Impressionism and post-Impressionism. Some examples of these corporate collections can be found in the Suntory Museum of Art, the Bridgestone Museum of Art, and the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum.

The country’s major contemporary art museums include the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, currently staging the rst ever retrospective of the 60s avant-garde Metabolism architecture movement; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Hiroshima; and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, a pioneering institution whose Asian Art Show helped to spark Japanese interest in Asian contemporary art as early as 1980. Several of these museums are designed by some of Japan’s leading architects – SANAA’s 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Jun Aoki’s Aomori Museum of Art, and Ryue Nishizawa’s Towada Art Center being the most notable examples.

Foundations
Among the many foundations that oversee Japan’s private and corporate art collections, one in particular stands out for the breadth and ambition of its public outreach programs and museum infrastructure. Headed by chairman of the Benesse educational publishing company Soichiro Fukutake, the Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation seeks to revive a particularly depopulated region of rural Japan through contemporary art and architecture. It runs four magnicent museums designed by Tadao Ando and Ryue Nishizawa, a luxury hotel also designed by Ando, and several contemporary art spaces in former industrial and derelict spaces that sprawl over three islands in the Seto Inland Sea, located between Okayama and Kagawa prefectures.

Another prominent presence is the Shiseido Foundation, which runs one of Tokyo’s most stimulating and challenging contemporary art spaces in the basement of the Tokyo Ginza Shiseido Building. The gallery itself dates back as far as 1919, but its current incarnation after a comprehensive refurbishment now focuses on Asian contemporary artists like Cai Guo-Qiang, Cao Fei, Masato Nakamura and Simryn Gill. Retired Shiseido president and honorary chairman Yoshiharu Fukuhara is currently director of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Ebisu, where he has spent the past decade turning around a moribund institution and successfully doubling its visitor numbers. Fukuhara is also co-president of the Kigyo Mécénat Kyogikai (KMK), a privately-established nonprot organization that promotes corporate patronage of the arts. The KMK played an instrumental role in introducing a number of initiatives that oer Japan-based corporations tax deductions for supporting art projects.

*The author is an independent writer, translator and editor based in Tokyo. He has written about Japanese contemporary art and architecture for Art Asia Pacific, Artforum, the Wall Street Journal, and the Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techo.

Art Stage Singapore Report – China

What is Chinese Contemporary Art? It’s an often asked question, yet so difficult to define primarily to the growing richness and diversity evident in Chinese contemporary art today. This has evolved from three-decade-long reforms and the extraordinary boom of the Chinese economy after 2000, launching China onto the world stage both culturally and economically. The ‘collective unconsciousness’ of this formative era gave rise to the ‘postrevolution’ period and the birth of diversity of style, concept and expression along with the dilution of ideology. Chinese contemporary art has no discernible group identity, rather there are distinctive characteristics stemming from political and authoritative styles, to more personal expression – centralisation has capitulated towards diversity and emphasis on the individual.

It is undeniable however, that there is a certain pedigree to Chinese contemporary art. Arising from the complexity of China’s history, society, politics and culture, the long-term
intellectual focus and contribution to Chinese contemporary art has propelled it towards phenomenal success in today’s global art market. This strength combined with the support
of investors and collectors gleaned from the newly rich class, has lead to dominance of leading auction of houses in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai by the work of some of the following globally-recognized ‘blue-chip’ artists.

Zhang Xiaogang
Zhang Xiaogang is undoubtedly the most represented artist of Chinese contemporary art, connecting painting with history in the search for meaning and implication in memory and amnesia. Old photos evoke a sad and melancholic tone yet simultaneously attempting to express a nostalgic sense of dream, solitude and loneliness. The work stimulates contemplation upon psychological analysis of people’s dreams and the point of their existence. His work has been under the spotlight at Sotheby and Christie’s auction since 2006.

Zeng Fanzhi
There is a unique visual expression in Zeng Fanzhi’s work that produces unforgettable images and lasting impressions. In the 1990s, Zeng built up his painting style through his mask series, emphasizing the implication of painting itself. His expression in painting is both humorous and serious as he attempts to express his cold perception of the external world.

Zhou Chunya
Zhou Chunya is well known by his painting series of subject matters such as “green dog” and “peach ower”. He has skilfully combined ‘free idea’ techniques in the traditional Chinese ink and wash painting with an expressive language, applying an almost single tone on canvas to create an “erotic” style of implication and metonymy.

Fang Lijun
Fang Lijun is a leading representative artist of China’s “cynical realism”. In recent years, he has replaced the pursuit of creation as content with cynicism, analysing and expressing microscopic life forms, depicting the existence of life into space and creating a painting language broadly associated with super-realism. His retrospective show titled “Living as a Wild Dog” toured to the Museum of Art Taipei, Guang Dong Museum of Art Guang Zhou, Today Art Museum Beijing and Xi’an Museum of Art and attracted wide attention and acclaim.

Yue Minjun
Yue Minjun is regarded as a highly skilled painter with an outstanding mastery of painting a visual language. His paintings depict his own image in a humorous and exaggerated style of self portraiture, themselves becoming a social and cultural symbol. The viewer must decide if they are either staring at a viewpoint on reality or staring and laughing at reality. Engaged in a dialogue between history and daily life, his kind of self-mockery reects upon our contemplation on today’s social issues.

Wang Guangyi
Wang Guangyi is a representative artist of China’s “Political Pop”. The meaning of his work is in his combination of posters made during the so-called “Great Proletarian Revolution” with Pop Art, drawing a connection between both Chinese and Western context. His unique style of pop art engages graphic design techniques on canvas, addressing political imagery and consumer culture.

Cai Guoqiang
Cai Guoqiang is renown both in mainland China and internationally; his recent retrospective show at the Guggenheim Museum of Art in 2008 was a rst for a Chinese artist. His series of works based on explosions are his original signature creations, and the remnants of explosives on rice paper the primary work of Cai Guoqiang in international collections.

Huang Yongping
Huang Yongping is perhaps the most renown overseas Chinese contemporary artist in the art world. In the “post-colonial” context of the 1990s, his work dealt with the cultural relationship between the East and West by using a visual expression in a critical and dynamic way. With the disappearance of “post-colonialism”, his concept has developed with sharp criticism, while reecting upon new issues relating to life, space, and physics. The work by other overseas Chinese artists such as Chen Zhen, Wang Du, Yan Peiming and Yang Jiechang, have a similar subject matter to Huang Yongping, though each are distinct in their unique and uncompromising styles.

Liu Wei
A distinctly personal and gifted painter, Liu Wei (together with artist Fang Lijun) was instrumental in constructing the painting style known as “cynical realism”. His paintings studiously avoid ‘mannerism’, while he persists with his technique of making so-called “bad” paintings – an emphasis on painting of the screen to express the mood or psychology of truth and nature of the common man. In recent years his work has become a popular and highly sought-after addition to international collections.

Wang Zhiyuan
Wang’s work is concerned with everyday issues such as nature, desire, violence and confusion; an exploration of the essence of art and confrontation of the “originality” of art making. His work emphasises the aesthetic and compositional qualities of objects often considered as ‘non-art’ such as bottles inducing a sense of a visual “displacement” in the viewer. Approachable yet critical, Wang’s work implies the hidden contradictions imbued in the process of China’s social development. With an independent will and a spirit of criticism, he is one of the few Chinese contemporary artists who have never bowed to the secular.

Gu Dexin
Gu Dexin came to international attention in the late 1980s with colorful portraits of alien
beings and provocative experiments in altering and reshaping plastics and other materials. In 1987 he formed the “Tactile Sensation Group” who worked primarily with perishable materials such as fruits, meat and animal intestines, which were left to decay in exhibition spaces. His conceptual approach to art marking is often cited by the younger generation as a key inuence.

Yang Fudong
Yang Fudong uses lm with supreme style. He rst learned about cinema, not from movies –which were restricted in China in the 1970s and 1980s – but from books. What his black/white lm installations forsake in narrative, they make up for in perfectly composed imagery and a heady atmosphere of yearning young people attempting to navigate changing urban and rural worlds. In 2011 and 2007 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale, in 2010 and 2004 at the Shanghai Biennale and in 2002 at Documenta 11.

Zhan Wang
Zhan Wang views his polished and lustrous sculptures as a metaphor for the fast changing face of China. Concentrating on abstract forms, which he calls oating stones his inspiration comes from the public sculpture often found outside Beijing’s new oce development buildings, as well as the feng shui of traditional landscape gardening. The shiny sculptures with reexive surfaces are large, highly textured rock-like pieces rendered in chrome.

OTHER NAMES TO KNOW

Private art institutions in China
Since Mainland China opened its doors in 1978, institutions for exhibiting, collecting and education in contemporary art have trod a rocky path. Professionalism at times non-existent, the practicalities involved in establishing non-profit art spaces have been inevitably complicated by legal, funding and personal issues. Rapid economic growth however has consequently boosted an increasing number of privately funded contemporary art museums, with a resultant rapid development of professionalism and success. As an added incentive, nonprofit status qualifies institutions for public subsidies and they can issue tax deductible receipts for donations.

However, many of these institutions have started-out as showcase architecture and vanity projects, funded and opened by property developers to provide a varnish of high culture, and justify high prices in the property sector. Others have been founded by enthusiastic members of the newly-rich aiming to showcase and share their art collections such as the  Rockbund in Shanghai and the True Color museum in Suzhou. To confuse the issue further, many commercial galleries use the name meishu guan |museum| instead of yi lang |gallery| for selfaggrandisement. Some of the more significant examples of private art institutions in China include:

• Today Art Museum in Beijing was the first not-for-profit art museum established in 2006
through private funding. It actively promotes the development of contemporary art in mainland China, highlighting the importance of academic research through the introduction of “Today’s Documents” and case studies, as well as solo exhibitions for artists such as Sui Jianguo, Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun. The museum has also published a series of books to advocate, untangle and demystify the mechanicism of Chinese contemporary art.

•The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) was established in the 798 Art District of Beijing, opening to the public in 2007 and financed by Belgian art collectors and entrepreneurs, Guy and Myriam Ullens. Consolidating and expanding their collection, they have been important observers and contributors of the development and changes of contemporary Chinese art. The founding of such a centre has provided a significant platform for contemporary Chinese artists to showcase their work and stimulate interest and discussion in the global market.

•Shanghai’s Minsheng Art Museum was the first institution funded by a private bank in mainland China, opening in 2008 with Zhou Tiehai, a practising artist, appointed as its director. The choice of an artist as director was a deliberate way to create a more favourable public perception and profile of art museums in China. Minsheng Bank plans to establish a large-scale museum of contemporary art next to 798 Art District in Beijing in 2012.

•Square Museum of Contemporary Art in Nanjing is a non-profit private multi-functional institution dedicated to the exhibition, preservation, research and education of contemporary art and architecture. It is designed by Steven Holl commissioned by Nanjing Foshou Lake Architecture and Art Developments Ltd. Due to open in December 2012, Zhu Tong, head of the 2010 Nanjing Biennale, has been appointed the museum director. Private foundations established for institutions or collecting have influenced and moulded the ‘ecology’, growth and development of contemporary Chinese art, and have become the
vehicle to enhance the profile and development of contemporary art in mainland China. Top international galleries such as Continua, Pace but also Gagosian and White Cube have recently bought into the art scene in China, setting up satellite spaces in Beijing or Hong Kong seeking to represent the big-name contemporary Chinese artists. This has proven irresistible to artists aware of the opportunities the big name galleries offer to showcase the artists’ work in important museums, art museums and in particular to introduce their work into top collections in the world. This competition has led many Asian galleries into a state of distress with the only solution for Asian galleries leaning towards fostering and supporting emerging artists.

*Born in Xi’an and based in Beijing, the author graduated with a Ph. D. from School of Art History and Theory, The Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. He has worked as an independent curator since 1994. Translated into English by Jin Hua Edited by Tim Crowley

Translated into English by Jin Hua
Edited by Tim Crowley

Art Stage Singapore Report – Indonesia

When it comes to Indonesian art, these are the names you need to know in the country’s rising Contemporary Art scene.

By RIFKY EFFENDY

I NYOMAN MASRIADI (B. 1973) “Invasion by the Clowns of Time”, 1999 Mixed media on canvas 145 x 200 cm
Image courtesy of OHD Museum.

One cannot deny the fact that the contemporary art boom in Indonesia involves the crucial role of the collectors, who have made the Indonesian art market so dynamic. They dominate the auction houses in Jakarta, Singapore, and Hong Kong; fight for works by “hot” artists such as I Nyoman Masriadi, Agus Suwage, Handiwirman Saputra, Yunizar, Jumaldi Alfi, Ay Tjoe Christine, Eko Nugroho, J. Ariadhitya Pramuhendra, Radi Arwinda, Wiyoga Muhardanto, Albert Yonathan Setiawan, Syagini Ratnawulan, Wimo Bayang and the Tromarama Group, as well as for works by the modern art maestros such as Affandi, Lee Man Fong, and S. Sudjojono. The last few auctions in Hong Kong have seen some surprising record prices.

I Nyoman Masriadi 
One of the most prominent Indonesian contemporary artists, I Nyoman Masriadi, specialises in acrylic paintings that comment satirically on the human condition. One his most notable works is The Man From Bantul (The Final Round), which eventually sold for US$1,000,725 at Sotheby’s (Hong Kong) – five times its estimated price.

Handiwirman Saputra 
A gifted painter and sculptor, Saputra uses unexpected combinations of artistic media to transform everyday objects into masterpieces. He always manages to give objects new symbolic and often ambiguous interpretations. Saputra is a member of the Jendela Art Group (which includes Jumaldi Alfi, Handiwirman Saputra, Rudi Mantofani, Yunizar and Yusra Martunus), a group that  shot to fame in the mid-1990s, and is known for its strong focus on formalism. In a country where its art is closely associated with its socio-political commentary, he and his fellow Jendela members offer a fascinating alternative.

Jumaldi Alfi
Co-founder and member of the Jendela Art Group, Alfi hails from Lintau, West Sumatra, Indonesia. His paintings have shifted in themes and styles in the last decade – initially reflecting autobiographical theme, then later evolving into metaphysical themes like life struggles and man’s identity. He has consistently explored new possibilities with painting techniques and tradition and combines expressionism, raw art and realism.

Agus Suwage
Known for his provocative drawings, installations, paintings and assemblages, Suwage is an internationally acclaimed artist. He incorporates popular culture and religious imagery into his art, and examines the relationship between humans and animals.

Rudi Mantofani
A sculptor and painter, Mantofani is known for presenting elements of surprise in his work. While his sculptures are focused on form, scale and the metaphorical, his paintings revolve around landscape. He constantly challenges painting tradition with visual ploys, like flattening pictorial space through heavy repetitions. He has exhibited widely in group shows in Indonesia and around the region.

Ay Tjoe Christine 
Born in Bandung, Ay Tjoe is a master at dry-point, a printing method where a design is etched directly on a metal printing paint. She has also explored various techniques alongside her signature dry-point: photography, painting, installation and even comics.

Nyoman Nuarta 
The Bali-born award-winning sculptor has works all over the country, including public sculptures and monuments throughout the peninsula. Nuarta is also the owner of the Studio Nyoman Nuarta, from where he actively produces his works, and founder of The Mandala Garuda Wisnu Kencana Foundation, a private cultural park where heavy metal band Iron Maiden played in February 2011.

OTHER NAMES TO KNOW

ESTABLISHED ARTISTS
Entang Wiharso, Heri Dono, Sri Astari, M. Irfan, Agapetus A. Kristiandana

UP-AND-COMING ARTISTS
Yudi Sulistyo, Ronald Manullang, I Made Widya Diputra, Erianto, Anggun Priambodo, Melati Suryodarmo, Andy Dewantoro

Born and based in Jakarta, the author trained as a ceramic artist in the Fine Art and Design department of the Institute Technology of Bandung. He has worked as an independent curator since 1997.

Translated into English by Rani E. Ambyo.

Our full reports include sections on the countries’ COLLECTORS, ART INSTITUTIONS and ART MARKET OVERVIEW & FIGURES.