14 ASIAN ART Travel


conglomerate. Te original character of 798 has become much more commercial since the days when local artist Huang Rui established a studio there and fought government attempts to redevelop the site. Commercial galleries and art foundations proliferate; Pace, Beijing Commune and Long March Space and a plethora of top flight galleries have since then nailed up their shingles. Te art can at times be patchy but always fun. Two years ago, luxury brand PR Lin


Han, who only started collecting contemporary art as recently as 2013 when he bought at auction a Zeng Fanzhi Mask painting, has opened his own M Woods museum in 798. Originally it was to show his own eclectic collection but more recently has transitioned into exhibitions curated by his new wife Wanwan Lei. She was, at one time, Chinese painter Liu Ye’s, muse. Li Han has sunk considerable dollars into M Woods and it deserves success but there is something slightly pretentious, even perhaps too extravagant about the place. Recently when I was there Lin Han and Lei, who was wearing a full- length Chinchilla coat, left the gallery and made off through 798 in a Han’s red Ferrari. ‘I like fast cars,’ he said. But this would seem to be the new face of China’s wealthy elite which, having grown up during the country’s recent 30-year transformation from a peasant agrarian society to one of communist capitalism, is now enjoying the goods thing in life.


Entrance to the new Minsheng Contemporary Art Museum, Beijing, a former electronics factory, opened in 2015


inverted ziggurat it would take even the most ardent visitor a whole day to just scratch the surface of the museum’s 27 exhibition halls, which cover the history of Chinese painting from the year dot to the present day. For antiquities, the best museum in


Shanghai is in Pudong, opposite Te Bund.


Among the sparkling


illuminated skyscrapers is the Aurora Museum – perhaps Shanghai’s best kept secret. Nothing contemporary here apart from the actual building which houses five floors of antiquities; the most exquisite


jade, ancient


terracotta figurines, blue and white porcelain and Buddhist sculptures present Chinese art in all its nuanced splendour. Tere are 72 museums in Shanghai and it would be impossible to see more than just a few of these. But the kaleidoscopic rate of museum building in the city in recent years demonstrates the Shanghai’s quest for cultural supremacy in China. However, Beijing is the country’s


capital and political powerhouse albeit a dusty, slightly shabby and down-at- heels place but with a charm that is


unique. Tere is nothing in China quite like the Forbidden City and Beijing remains the epicentre


of


China’s art world and the country’s cultural capital. I have been told several times that there are more artists in Beijing than anywhere else in the country and I believe it. Recently the young artist Zhou Zhou when I interviewed him said that close to his studio beyond the 5th Ring Road there were 10,000 artists. Zhou Zhou is young and successful and has two studios. One is in Chaochangdi, which at one time was little more than a rural village in the North East of Beijing with open fields and dusty streets. Once superstar artist Ai Weiwei moved there in 1999 and designed and built his own enclave other artists followed along with commercial galleries. His initial studio design was sketched out on the back of an envelope and built in 60 days, he said and there was no planning permission. Subsequently he went on to design an estate close by of utilitarian but attractive boxy brick studios of various sizes. Weiwei took us on a walking tour that ended up at


Just 10 minutes from 798, the Minsheng Bank has opened the sprawling Minsheng Contemporary Art Museum, which exemplifies much that is wrong in the current wave of museum building in China, where the art seems secondary to the actual destination buildings. Te exhibition spaces are huge and the art works are few and far between. Te star art and antiquities


attraction in Beijing is the National Museum of China on the eastern side of Tiananmen Square. With over one million items the


Te Gao Brothers cafe in the 798 Art Zone, Beijing,


Galerie Urs Meile, which he also designed. Qing Wangsong , the darkly humorist photographer has a studio in the brick enclave and explained to me that he still uses a special handmade film camera. Acquiring the oversize film was a challenge until he stumbled upon 500 sheets. He bought them all and now stores them in several fridges in the studio. ‘Tey must be kept at minus 10 degrees Celsius,’ he said. As he only uses two negatives annually, his future projects


are assured. It was here in the back streets of Chaochangdi that I tasted my first jianbing (pancake) and went on to enjoy them daily from the street vendor located just outside of the boutique 5-star Yi House hotel, the only hotel in the 798 complex. Te most entertaining art complex in Beijing, perhaps even in China, is the 798 Art District with dozens of galleries, design stores, and restaurants clustered together in a Russian Bauhaus style ex-industrial


museum offers a comprehensive overview of Chinese history with curios such as the flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that was raised by Chairman Mao at the proclamation of the PRC in 1949 before 300,000 people who crowded into Tiananmen. If you want more of Chairman Mao he lies in perpetuity in a crystal sarcophagus in a mausoleum in the middle of the square. Be prepared to queue for entry with the thousands of Chinese tourists who are up from the country enjoying a day out in the capital. It is all extremely macabre. But gazing on Mao’s waxen face is hard to resist. Chinese artist Shen Shaomin


Lin Han and his wife Wanwan Lei, founders of the M Woods Art Museum, at 798 Art Zone, Beijing


ASIAN ART SUMMER QUARTER 2017 Tiananmen Square, Beijing, people queue for entry to Mao’s mausoleum


whose vast concrete studio cost him a fortune to build outside Beijing knows what gazing at Mao’s dead face is like. In 2006, he spent hours in the mausoleum doing just this. Te result was his sculpture Te Great Corpse 2006, showing Mao as naked as the day he was born. Rather than displaying Te Great Corpse in a coffin similar to the one at Tiananmen Square, Shaomin placed the sculpture on a stainless steel mortuary gurney. Te silicone figure is as life-like as one can imagine a figure to be in death. Tere is a grey hue to the flesh and the body displays real human hair carefully added one strand at a time. Te work was owned by the Swiss collector Uli Sigg, who presented it to Hong Kong’s M+ Museum along with a part sale/part gift of 1,462 other works of contemporary Chinese art. It has never been shown in public and the likelihood of it ever being exhibited remains remote.


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