12 ASIAN ART Travel


Te lake at Jin Feng’s studio estate showing the Chen Wenling sculpture on its raft of recycled plastic bottles


Comrade in Arms (1978) by Cheng Yunxian, bronze figures. Revolutionary Art in Long Museum, Pudong, Shanghai


CHINA ART TRAVEL By Michael Young T


o visit artist Jin Feng’s studio beyond Beijing’s 5th Ring Road is a little like stepping


back through time. Te studio is part of a vast predominantly deserted rural estate that was once the home of Wan Li, Communist party apparatchik until he was purged during the Cultural Revolution only to be rehabilitated three years before Mao’s death in 1976. He became Vice Premier in 1984 and Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in 1988. His exulted position brought with it extreme privileges; one of which was this estate with inside and outside tennis courts and an Olympic-sized swimming pool overlooking a huge lake.


On the lake is a small barge made


from grubby recycled plastic bottles on which sat a Chen Wenling sculpture from his Red Boy series. It shared the space with several ducks. Tere are dozens of buildings around the lake with endless corridors and cell-like rooms. Each room seems to have several exit doors that lead through into more rooms where extravagant bloated furniture, a little like inflated Erwin Wurm sculptures, wait to support bodies that today will never come. It is all part of the extravagance afforded to communist leaders. Now the estate is privately owned by someone who does not seem to have enough money for maintenance. It is rapidly decaying. Tere was a dream to turn it into an art space, thus Feng’s tenure. But nothing happened. Te owner is old and sick and the only other estate tenant apart from Feng is an herbalist brought over from Taiwan and an old horse sheltering in a disintegrating corrugated iron shed. Te location is such a secret that taxi drivers do not know it exists. It is all slightly eerie. I am sworn to secrecy. Wan Li lived to be 98 and died in 1993. I have been visiting China annually


for a decade or more mainly Beijing and Shanghai but always with an art- focused agenda, writing about artists and their studios – emerging artists as well as those who have become fixtures on the international art stage. I also visit collectors and gallerists. I have trawled through capacious museums in an attempt to understand


Te modern Shanghai skyline with the Oriental Pearl Radio and TV tower (1994) in the foreground in Pudong district


and demystify the curious activity that is art. Because I write about art I am privileged and can gain access to artists and their studios when many travellers cannot. Even so, there is much to see by way of museums and galleries in both Shanghai and Beijing along with the now Chinese phenomenon of ‘art zones’. For example,


798 Art Zone and


Caochangdi in Beijing and M50 in Shanghai – all offer hours of endless pleasure. Te more I look at art the more I feel aligned with Anselm Kiefer’s epithet,


‘Te beauty art


produces will dissolve into ashes when it is brought to the level of speech’.


I am increasingly overwhelmed by the aesthetics of Asian art in all its nuanced sensibilities, from ancient Qing manuscripts and porcelain, calligraphy and ink painting through to the latest and at times outrageous contemporary outpourings by artists who would do better working in another field. When you read this, I will be in


Shanghai again, or maybe Hangzhou. One young artist I will visit in Hangzhou is Zhou Yilun, who has a reputation as an enfant terrible, and, I am told, has a ‘special studio space/ gallery/bar/tattoo parlour’. Te latter alarms me. He is a wild-card and I fear


that he might only agree to an interview if I agree to a tattoo ... Nonetheless, we have arranged to meet. By any measure Shanghai is a


vibrant cosmopolitan city whose fortunes have been built on financial muscle and an ingrained entrepreneurial spirit with a colourful history predicated on the opium trade and an anything-goes mentality during the early part of the twentieth century. Not for nothing was it known as ‘Te Whore of the Orient’. It was also known as ‘Te Pearl of the Orient’ for its artistic and intellectual community. Today it is home to 24 million people and the transformation


over the last 25 years into an international centre of commerce has been astonishing; old hutongs have been swept aside to make way for dozens of tower blocks and acres of residential towers have now spread rapidly across outer city areas. Fortunately, many heritage buildings remain such as those that line the city’s historic Bund on the western banks of the Huangpu River. Just back from the Bund is Anfu Road where until recently American expat Mathieu Borysevicz had his MAB Bank Society gallery space in the otherwise empty former Bank Union Building that was established in 1929. MAB has moved to new premises but the decaying, faded and semi-derelict building remains complete with a caretaker who likes nothing more than to stand and chat about the history of the building and to point out the Cultural Revolution signage on the building’s façade that still remains today. Swiss émigré Lorenz Helbling opened ShanghART Gallery in the city


in 1996. It was the first


independent gallery for contemporary art in Shanghai. ‘Tere was a no art here then. Nobody came to Shanghai to see art,’ he told me last year. Today of the 50 or so artists he represents several are top-tier Shanghai based artists including Zhang Enli, Xu Zhen, Ding Yi, Yang Fudong, and Yu Youhan all of whom remain fiercely loyal to ShanghART. Yang Fudong the wildly successful auteur film maker confided last year how Helbling helped him to make it back in his


Te old Bank Union Building (est 1929), at one time occupied by Bank MAB Society gallery, Shanghai


ASIAN ART SUMMER QUARTER 2017


Yuz Museum, Shanghai, West Bund


Te Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai


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