Millennial artists in China – optimistic, globalist and revelling in freedom of the internet
- Artists featured in a new book by curator Barbara Pollack were all born after Mao Zedong’s death and see the world very differently to their forebears
- Being only children has driven them to seek global success
China’s new generation of millennial artists are globalist in their outlook and unrelentingly positive about their future, says New York-based writer and independent curator Barbara Pollack, who is in Hong Kong to promote her new book, Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise.
“Artists in the US seem very provincial in comparison and seem full of complaints about the art market and how they can’t find a gallery and how collectors are messed up,” says Pollack.,
Pollack’s first contact with Chinese artists was in the 1990s, when she was covering contemporary art from around the world. At the time, editors were only interested in whether Chinese art was a flash in the pan similar to what was seen with Russian art.
“All I can say is that at the time Zhang Xiaogang was selling for US$25,000. If I had bought a Zhang Xiaogang back then, I’d be talking to you as a millionaire rather than as a journalist,” says Pollack.
She took her first trip to China in 2004 to visit the Shanghai Biennial, “Techniques of the Visible” and sensed that the art market was about to explode. Since then she has been visiting regularly and in 2010 published her first book on Chinese art, The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China.