This week (Part one)
Meetings with Wang Chunchen, curator of the Chinese pavilion at this years Venice Biennale and Karen Smith, British curator based in China since 1992.
Visit to ‘ON | OFF Young Chinese Artists’ show at 798 art district
Many friends and colleagues from the UK have kindly pointed me in the direction of people and places I should meet or visit while here in Beijing. Rachel Marsden at the Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester directed me towards Wang Chunchen and Karen Smith.
Chunchen is a curator and art critic based at the CAFA Art Museum at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing. He is also an Adjunct Curator of The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum of Michigan State University. Chuchen is known for his contributions to the arts via his own body of works, publications and curatorial experiences.
I met him at CAFA, the very huge and impressive museum on the art school campus. CAFA, the only art academy of higher learning directly under the Chinese Ministry of Education, was founded in April 1950 by merging the National Beijing Art College and the Fine Arts Department of Huabei University. Chunchen has been selected this year to curate the Chinese pavilion at Venice. He told me that this means that he is suddenly in demand from the wider Chinese press (this was evidenced by his phone ringing off the hook during our meeting!) I asked him about any potential outside political influence in the show he intends curate. He told me that there are certain obvious politically contentious issues that if he put in a proposal, then he would almost certainly not be selected.
After our meeting, I had a look at the CAFA collection. The collection contains a wide variety of over 13,000 works from representative artworks by ancient and modern Chinese masters to student works. It struck me as one of those incredibly impressive buildings that are not particularly fit for purpose. The entrance foyer is enormous and bigger that most of the gallery spaces. Additionally the exterior walls of the building are slanted at an upward angle meaning that freestanding walls have to be built within the space to mount any 2-dimensional work.
My next meeting was with Karen Smith, the longest standing British freelance curator working in China. I met her at her office and home near the Forbidden City. We had a long and interesting conversation about how Chinese art is perceived both by artists making work here in China and in the UK and the west generally. It seems like there are no easy conclusions to this question. At the moment Karen is working on an annual publication, which is a summary of the best work she has seen in shows around the country by Chinese artists. She has produced a number of these publications now and hopes that they will become a valuable document in time.
We had another interesting conversation about abstraction in Chinese art (I noticed that she had a number of large abstract paintings in her office) where she pinpointed a period of time in the early 80’s, not long after the end of the cultural revolution, where to make works that did not expressly represent anything was a politically daring move. This period didn’t last for long as the Chinese art market boom came along soon after, driven by an appetite from western collectors to acquire ‘Chinese-ness’ works. Karen believes that many Chinese artists don’t have a context with which to approach abstract art. We talked about the abstraction present in ancient expressive calligraphic ink paintings and how the Chinese don’t view these as being abstract in any way.
