I’ve come to Chongqing with a double pronged mission. I have my own research into the apparently unified style emerging from Chinese Art Academies, as well as an exhibition to realise with collective psychoanalYSL (Joey Holder, Benjamin Orlow & Christopher Thomas) who will be joining me in a few weeks. These projects are without a doubt allied, as my reason for inviting the collective is palpable in their guiding operation to “take hipness as form”. Having been told by many voices, Chinese, English and American, artists and curators alike, that there is very little ‘content’ to the surplus of oil paintings emerging from Chinese academies, for psychoanalYSL, the separation between form and content is misplaced. Their London exhibition THE EMACIATED SPECTATOR was immediately identified as urgent to current conversations concerning the professionalisation of the art system (‘Rebel Without A Course’, Peter Suchin, Art Monthly, April 2011). This exhibition will export the collective’s hyper-real vision of their ‘scene’ in London to Chongqing, then reflect this back at UK audiences to consider: Where does a style come from? Is critical discourse simply a smoke screen for art’s absorption into capital?
Since my invitation to undertake this project the collective have watched with keen interest the monetization of activism and festival of protest which exploded during Ai Weiwei’s detention by Chinese authorities. I was the butt of a wrong footed response from a prominent ACE funded contemporary art organisation in the UK who pulled out of showcasing this project for fear of being associated with politically problematic cultural exchange with China. So, for UK audiences we currently have two talks set-up for Autumn, one at Chinese Arts Centre (Manchester) who are partners in this project, and another at Arnolfini (Bristol) as part of the Tertulia series. We’re looking for an opportunity to bring the exhibition to the UK after showcasing in Chongqing.
501 Arts Centre is situated in Huang Je Ping, the artistic district of the sprawling city of Chongqing. The first thing you see when you google “Chongqing” is that it is the largest city in the world, with 35 million residents and hundreds moving here from the countryside each day. Upon arrival the drive from the airport speaks of this. The high rise apartments are never ending. The main industry in the city was previously armaments, and although some are still active, many of the bullet and tank factories have been converted into art studios. The Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, established in 1940 is among the oldest and most eminent art academies in China alongside Central Academy of Fine Art (Beijing). It’s the locus of a growing art scene in the Huang Je Ping district of Chongqing which is dominated by over 15,000 art students. Students are catered for with a lively night market and the government have even commissioned street artists to adorn the Soviet architecture with graphic cartoony murals and stencils to rival Shorditch.
501 Contemporary Art Centre (gallery and studios) was established by the director Yanyan in 2006. Yanyan’s the facilitator of this project and I’ll be working with him on a daily basis. A graduate from Sichuan Institute he spent years as an artist in Beijing before returning to Chongqing to take up a teaching post at the art school. He found a critical mass of artists, including himself looking for studio space and initiated the rental of an empty building, a former train factory. Other similar set-ups have emerged since and the cycle of regeneration has already begun to take its toll with rents of the 501 studios rocketing and commercial graphic artists mostly now occupying the trendy creative hub. Artists are being forced out to cheaper districts at a pace faster than I’ve witnessed for their London counterparts. Yanyan describes himself as a sensitive and pessimistic outsider to the academy system, twenty years younger than the president at Sichuan Institute Zhongli Luo. Luo has benefited from a career supported by the Chinese government who famously used his romantic painting of a peasant titled “Father”. Yanyan has a dedicated flock of students at his heals who praise him as an exceptional teacher, one who understands the best conversations happen outside the classroom.
