THE HOTTEST medium in China is video art, with three major exhibitions in Shanghai, alone, last month. The first was the Shanghai Art Museum's Zooming into Focus event, which featured displays borrowed from Eloisa and Chris Haudenschild, who own the world's largest private collection of contemporary Chinese video and photo art, including works by the prodigious video-artists Yang Fudong and Feng Mengbo.
Then, there was the exhibition of mainly video art at the state-sponsored Shanghai Duolan Museum of Modern Art and then at the Shanghai Gallery of Art. At that opening last month, Taiwan-born artist Lin Shu-min stole the show with a video installation that projected images of naked people writhing in cardboard boxes.
China's artists are making a name for themselves in video art. Lin exhibited works in the medium when he co-curated the Venice Biennale, and Yang has exhibited in Paris and Italy.
'Video art is now the medium of choice for many artists who want to capture their world and grapple with the issues that new technology presents,' says Eloisa Haudenschild. When the Haudenschilds followed up their Zooming exhibition with a symposium on video art in China, they held it in Hangzhou's China Academy of Art, rather than in Shanghai and Beijing. Their decision brought China's most fashionable arts medium to the nation's new arts centre, about two hours outside Shanghai.
'Hangzhou was just the right fit for this event,' says Haudenschild. The city enjoys creative-centre status in China, largely because of its pre-eminent art school, but is untainted by politics, like Beijing. 'Many of my friends, these artists, live in or around Hangzhou. Showing in Beijing would have been too difficult with all the logistics and bureaucracy.'
According to Martina Koeppel-Yang, an independent art critic and scholar of contemporary Chinese art, 'there is no underground in Beijing'. She says artists in the capital 'remain under the constant watch of the political machine, whereas those outside of the political centre, in Shanghai or Hangzhou, have the opportunity and freedom to experiment unnoticed'.