Evolution of Chinese contemporary art traced in Hong Kong exhibition
Works from some of China’s top private collections, including those belonging to Guan Yi, Lu Xun and Zheng Hao, create a visual narrative central to the development of contemporary art in China
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.
Lu’s collection is all about recording history being made. The son of a Nanjing, Jiangsu province property developer, Lu is part of the post-80s generation and has the resources and ambition to think big. His section of the Hong Kong exhibition includes architectural models of some of the 25 buildings that he and his father commissioned, including the Sifang Art Museum, in Nanjing, and a residential project. Another model, by Shanghai-based artist Xu Zhen, is of a landscaped garden.
Lu, a Cambridge University graduate, says he likes the individualism of younger artists, who “are not weighed down by politics or a grand ideology like previous generations”. One Hong Kong artist he enjoys is 31-year-old Oscar Chan Yik-long, whose fairy-tale Gothic vision gives the audience plenty of room for imagination.
Zheng has brought a selection of his Joseph Beuys collection to Hong Kong. The Chinese designer and hotel operator probably owns the biggest Beuys archive in the world – more than 300 pieces, according to curator Ling Min, who feels that such an archive has a place in China because of the enormous influence that the German artist had on the country’s “85 New Wave” movement.
Art critics Fei Dawei and Gao Minglu are sharing their archives of photographs, reviews and videos of what they curated during the 1990s.
For those interested in the development of Chinese contemporary art, this is the most informative exhibition on the subject this season in Hong Kong.
The 5th Collectors’ Contemporary Collaboration will run at Pao Galleries, Hong Kong Arts Centre, 2 Harbour Road, Wan Chai, until April 22. Admission is free. Public tours in Cantonese and English are held every weekend for the duration of the exhibition.
