The Collector | Evolution of Chinese contemporary art traced in Hong Kong exhibition

Each year, around Art Basel week, the Hong Kong Arts Centre asks well-known collectors across the world to bring over some of their prized possessions. Known as the Collectors’ Contemporary Collaboration, the latest edition has culminated in an exhi­bitionshowing selections from the collections of Guan Yi, Lu Xun and Zheng Hao, at the Wan Chai-based centre’s Pao Galleries.

Though inherently different, the three selections are built on a wish to, when shown side by side, create a visual narrative about the development of Chinese contemporary art.

Born in the 1960s, Guan has one of the most extensive collections of early Chinese avant-garde art, with thousands of works and documentation that trace develop­ments during a time when China fluctuated wildly between liberalisation and authori­tarian control. In Hong Kong, he is showing works by artists who, in the 70s, began to rebel against the socialist academic style and embraced Western influences, such as French-American painter Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual art and pop art. Such pieces would eventually emerge as the main­stream of Chinese contemporary art and continue to have an uneasy relation­ship with official ideology.

Guan points to works such as Huang Yongping’s Large Turntable with Four Wheels (1987) and Zhong Ming’s He is Himself – Sartre (1980) as being typical of the flourishing of new ideas before the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. He cherishes the call for democracy inherent in some of the pieces he brought to Hong Kong and says he felt obliged to buy as many as he could as soon as he made his fortune, in petro­chemicals in the 90s, because only Western collectors were buying art in a systematic manner then. He has also obsessively collected newspaper articles and exhibition catalogues from that time onwards.