Emily Feng Public vs. Private

EMILY FENG // 03.04.2014 // Art Spaces: Art as Contrived in China Today

Source: Wikimedia

The “museumification” of China has been well documented. Yet underneath the changing landscape of Chinese art lies a more subtle ambiguity in what purpose these spaces, and the art they exhibit, serve. Art spaces, which we regard as ideally incommensurable with commercial valuation, is increasingly seen as a way to disseminate soft power and project prestige.

The contradi(stin)ction between art as either aesthetic or commodity is perhaps nowhere better embodied than at the Poly Art Museum. Opened in 1999, the museum owns valuable bronzes and stone sculptures from China’s antiquity. Also housed in same building is Poly International Auction Company, an auction house founded in 2005 that now handles 11% of China’s art market, which in 2011 amounted to US$2 billion at its peak. Both are owned by the China Poly Group Corporation, a massive state-owned enterprise with links to the People’s Liberation Army. Much of its early profits came from arms sales to international bad boys such as Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and most recently, Syria. Much of these profits were reinvested in the 1980s into property and now, art.

The museum is tucked away on the ninth floor, as if it were an afterthought in the construction of the building. In contrast to the crushing openness of the building’s glass lobby, the museum is darkly lit. Sounds are quickly muffled by the thick carpet and two stern men in black suits, who linger at the edge of each room I enter. Severe bronze drinking vessels and stern bodhisattvas are ensconced in glass cases that keep the viewer at a distance.

A distinctly nationalist vibe/aura/atmosphere permeates the space. The museum’s prize artifacts are a set of reclaimed bronze animal heads that were “robbed by Western powers” from the Old Summer Palace after the Boxer Rebellion. Combined with the museum’s sponsor and its many state ties, the Poly Museum represents the heavily symbolic function museum spaces function in China. It’s a phenomenon seen time and again; while art may start out as purely aesthetic, it is often appropriated to serve political ends.

Yet since the 1940s, art has been expressly ideological. Using art as an expression of power and status is not wholly new. China’s biggest museums continue to be state-sponsored museums (National Museum of China, the Geological Museum of China, and Taiwan’s National Palace Museum round out the top three spots). Nearly 655,000 artifacts that currently reside in Taipei’s National Palace Museum are the subject of a decades-long Chinese effort to reclaim national treasures it asserts were wrongfully spirited away by retreating Nationalist armies in the 1940s; the artifacts have taken on a symbolic nature in the context of strained mainland and Taiwan relations. Art itself can be ideological: In his 1942 “Yan’an speech,” Mao Zedong articulated the Chinese government’s conception of art for the next four decades: literature and the arts formed a “cultural army,” part of the “whole revolutionary machine” that existed solely to advance socialist thinking.

While art has lost some of its ideological salience, China’s current Five Year Plan recently designated “culture” as a “pillar industry,” meaning it should contribute 5% of GDP by the 2015. In response, a newspaper article in the state-run Guangming Daily declared culture as “the blood and soul of a nation,” and recognizes culture’s soft power as “the power behind national development and national rejuvenation.” Ad local Chinese governments have facilitated this cultural push by doing what they do best: build. China is building an average of 100 new museums each year for the past five years. 85% of museums are state-owned and funded. Pressured to open and fill gleaming new museum spaces, provincial governments sometimes resort to desperate measures. Fakes and forgeries pose a huge problem for art dealers and museums in China; in July, a local Hebei museum was revealed to contain over 40,000 fake artifacts, making nearly all of its acquisitions forgeries.

Yet contrary to the heavy-handed, and sometimes duplicitous, curation habits in public art spaces, a bevy of smaller, non-profit and private art spaces that have sprung up in the last decade. These smaller, yet no less influential, art spaces are introducing a new model for presenting art. The Today Art Museum (今日美术馆), China’s first privately-owned art museum founded in 2002, is emblematic of an emerging approach to art and art education. Zhang Baoquan, a Beijing real-estate magnate, began/founded? the museum during its first years with his own personal fortune, which has given the museum more flexibility when choosing artists to exhibit. Rather than attempt turn art into a commercial endeavor (the museum is also run as a non-profit), Today Art Museum promotes art exposure rather than national power.

Gao Peng, the museum’s newly-minted director, recollects that as a child there was little opportunity to go to museums. Instead, he and his peers resorted to looking at pictures of art in books simply because museums were few and inaccessible. Although there has been an increasing supply of Chinese art spaces, it is unclear whether the Chinese population at large has an appetite for art.

Peng sees the disjuncture between supply and demand as a problem of lagging public art education. “Contemporary art is like a new language that people need to learn,” he stated rather matter-of-factly. And so, in addition to curating exhibitions, Today Art Museum runs public programs for urban and migrant schoolchildren in order to expose them to art and art-making. “Most of these children will not have a talent for art, but if only one of them decides to pursue art as a result, then that is a good thing.” Phil Tinari attributes the lack of art “software” to a lag in professional art education. “We are still waiting for these graduates to enter the system in significant numbers. Meanwhile the generation currently in power often lacks the linguistic and cultural savvy to engage meaningfully with the outside world,” he explained via email. Tinari is the director for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), a not-for-profit art center. Much like Today Art Museum, the UCCA organizes both exhibitions and public education programs.

Furthermore, unlike state-run museums that present a standardized historiography or project a nationalist identity, Today Art Museum “doesn’t try to present one version of ‘Chinese art.’ In fact, we own very little art ourselves,” Peng noted. In some ways, private art spaces like Today Art Museum and the UCCA are less about showcasing art as they are about promoting an art movement: by promoting new artists and bridging art production with public interest, they have provided the infrastructure for a burgeoning Chinese contemporary art scene. And unlike public museums, Today Art Museum does not have to submit their exhibition line-ups for pre-approval, though that does not give Peng total latitude. “I don’t know what would happen if we had an Ai Weiwei exhibition,” he admitted.

Still, art spaces like Today Art Museum serve as important counterweights to the cultural hegemony of government-backed museums. With 535 privately-run museums in mainland China and growing art communities like Beijing’s 798 Art District, museums like Today Art will hopefully become less of an exception. No longer does blatant propaganda and Social Realism have cultural currency in Chinese society. Today’s political commentary must be more subtle and less harsh on the eye. Yet simply because the politics of art are no longer front and center does not mean they are as fraught as ever. With the popularity of both classical and contemporary Chinese art growing, politics now play out in exhibition spaces in addition to public spaces, contested through not just rhetoric but art as well.

About the Author

Emily Feng is a junior at Duke University. She is president of DEAN and also co-directs the China Leadership Summit. You can contact her at emily.z.feng@gmail.com.