New York's Asian Art Week

New York Times art critic Holland Carter finds the annual Asian Art Fair a disappointment today, but singles out some (mostly ancient) artifacts for praise.

"The sad news is that this year’s fair, which opens today, is a ghost of what it once was. * * * To its credit, the Asian fair struggles impressively. Its signature suaveness is intact, and it still has some memorable art moments."

The difficulty, Cotter rather coyly remarks, is that "problems developed."

"Top-shelf material to sell became harder to find. For various reasons, the fair’s starriest exhibitors dropped out, often to put on Asia-week shows on their own. When the fair added the phrase “also featuring the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas” to its title last year, the distress signal was loud and clear."

In compensation, he says, dozens of private dealers "have set up shop for the week... in quite spectacular fashion" on East 57th Street. But for the long term, Cotter sensibly suggests, it may be time to focus on "contemporary Asian art."

"There’s a ton of it being pumped out, of which New Yorkers see but a fraction, nowhere near enough to give an idea of what’s really going on, which is the only way to separate gold from dreck. As a result, almost everything we see exists without a context, and looks odd and marooned. Maybe the Asian Fair could give it a context. I mean, if the fair really sees contemporary art as its future, why not go for it? A pan-Asian Modern and contemporary fair would be a valuable addition to the city. Done right, with savvy heads in charge ... it could be an event, make news."

Huzzah to that! Somewhere, sometime, a city that aspires to be the cultural center of the world will have to come to grips with contemporary Asian art, if for no other reason than as a consumer protection measure for its citizens. Better New York than Paris, Shanghai or, Minerva forbid, Dubai.

As Cotter quite rightly points out, a great deal of "dreck"is masquerading as contemporary Asian art these days. In China alone, dozens if not hundreds of alleged "art schools" dragoon thousands of aspiring young people every year into becoming mere copyists. Their assembly line 'work' is quickly shipped off to the West where it competes with genuine art instead of hanging above the headboard of some Motel 6 room where it belongs.

Oil Painters of America Annual Juried Show

Artists, collectors, and art students: registration is open for the 16th Annual Juried National Art Exhibition of the Oil Painters of America.

This year, the event takes place in beautiful "hill country" Fredericksburg, Texas, about an hour's drive equidistant from exciting Austin or exotic San Antonio.

The national exhibition runs from May 11 – June 9, 2007. Opening weekend ceremonies and festivities take place May 10 – 13.

A complete schedule of events is here (html) and here (pdf).

Over a hundred oil painting entries already have been accepted. No paintings will be sold before May 12, but offers may be submitted in advance.

Whistle Pik Galleries is the host gallery in Fredericksburg. Other local institutions participating include the Admiral Nimitz History Museum and the internationally-oriented Fredericksburg Artist's School.

The art school is sponsoring a series of artist workshops May 7 through 14.

Guerrilla 'Art' Gone

You may have missed it while you were wandering through that art museum. This week, a 25-feet long spray-painted mural by Robert Banksy -- "one of Banksy's early pieces," we are told -- was apparently destroyed when city workmen in Bristol, England, painted over it with thick paint. According to the BBC, the workmen were dispatched to "tackle graffiti adjacent to the Banksy work, but wrongly targeted the piece itself."

It's not the first time Banksy's so-called "guerrilla" art has been vandalized. Earlier this month, the BBC also reported , "a London council has admitted street cleaners accidentally washed off two Banksy murals, including one of a girl in a frilly dress wearing a gas mask, from the side of a building."

London and Bristol councilmen claim to be scandalized at the losses. In recent years, more portable Banksy works have escalated in price. Last year, Sotheby's sold a Banksy sketch of "the Mona Lisa... spray-painted green and with paint dripping from her eyes," for more than $218,000. And, a Banksy silk screen of Kate Moss in the manner of Andy Warhol sold for nearly $115,000.

Apparently, the Bristol and London pols are worried someone will think they've lost valuable city property when their Banksy murals -- spray-painted on the sides of buildings -- bit the dust. It's difficult to see how the city has lost any value -- unless the politicians really don't mean it when they say city policy is "not to remove murals."

It's so hard to believe politicians. Three years ago Banksy "covertly cemented" a 20-foot high, 3 ton statue of Dame Justice "with US dollar bills stuffed into her garter" into Clerkenwell square in London. Reportedly, the city fathers removed it by crane two days later.

No one seems to know where it is today. Whadda ya bet it shows up at auction -- sooner, rather than later?

Banksy himself presumably might have approved the obliteration of his early work. After the recent Sotheby's auction where price records were set, Banksy's website "featured a sketch of an auction room with a message on a canvas saying: "I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit."

Anyway, why buy a Banksy when he invites you to have one for free from his web site? Be sure to follow the instuctions:

"Prints look best when done on gloss paper using the company printer ink when everyone else is at lunch."

"From China With Love"

The estimable Chicago Reader notes the opening yesterday of a photography exhibition by the Gao Brothers at Walsh Gallery, in Chicago. According to the gallery:

"On March 16th Walsh Gallery presents photography and sculpture by Beijing-based artist duo the Gao Brothers. "From China with Love" is an investigation into the effects of Chinese urbanization on the spirit.
* * *
"Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang have expressed an alternative voice during the 20 years that they have been making art in China. They experimented in performance art, installation and photography during the mid 1980s when these practices were only in their infancies."

Several photographic series are included, among them "TV," "From China with Love," "Embrace," and "High Places." These series include photographs depicting various "real and imaginary" events. Explains the Walsh gallery:

"China's rapid globalization and the sexual ambiguity that often appears in the Gao Brothers' work refers not to sexual confusion; it's about a confusion of spirit. This sexual androgyny also questions conventional party line logic on what is normal and what is pornographic.

"The Gao Brothers simultaneously invite the viewer to share in these feelings of confusion while hoping all along for a little more love for us all."

Gao Zhen (b. 1952) and his younger brother, Gao Qiang (b. 1962) come from Shandong Province, but now maintain a studio in Beijing's former "No. 798 Electronic Components Factory," the centerpiece of the Da Shanzi art district. Zhen is a graduate of the Shandong Academy of Arts and Crafts. Qiang graduated from Qufu Normal University and is now a painter at the Shandong College of Light Industry.

They work with a variety of media including painting, sculpture, and photography. They're best known, however, for "digital art" performances like World Hug Day. Last year, the UK Guardian mentioned that "1989 until 2003, they were on the government blacklist and forbidden to leave the country. But they are now part of a new wave of Chinese artists wowing galleries abroad."

The Walsh gallery exhibit runs until April 28.

Pipa Revival

As with European music from the Medieval to the Baroque, there is something of a revival of ancient Chinese music going on, played with authentic period instruments. Kathie Price contributes an interesting feature article to The Arizona Republic today, titled "Foothills Woman Masters Pipa."

Phoenix musician La Mai Gates (below, right) is featured. She plays the Pipa, an ancient Chinese lute-like instrument that dates back to well before the Ch'in dynasty (221-206 B.C. E.) .

"The pipa is a familial favorite for Gates, a concert master and soloist with the Phoenix Chinese Art Ensemble. Her father was a pipa professor at the Shenyang Conservatory of Music in the northeast province of Liaoning. Her mother, her uncles, aunts and cousins all played the pipa as she grew up.
* * *
As a tot, Gates listened to a cousin play the pipa.

"I got a lot of influence from my family," she said. "My dad not only taught, he used to fix pipa and make them."

In middle school, we're told, she "majored in pipa with piano as a minor." The pipa "is not an easy instrument to learn," Price warns.

"The 2,000-year-old pear-shaped lute, also known as a Chinese guitar, has four or five strings and as many as 30 bridges to produce 12 tones and a range of more than three and half octaves."

Playing the pipa requires both strumming (pi or 琵) and plucking (pa or 琶) the strings.

Master painter Tu Zhiwei's conception of how the pipa was played while dancing in the grottos of Dunhuang can be seen in the reproduction, above. It is one of his first murals, completed in 1994.

That mural is now in private hands, but the pipa theme is repeated in some of his other Dunhuang paintings and murals, inspired by the thousands of wall drawings and documents uncovered by archaeologists in western China in the 1970's.

Ancient treasure troves are still being discovered, even today, in remote areas of China as well as metropolitan Beijing. Urns, funeral masks, clothes, weapons, even an entire 'pottery army'.

But the pipa remains something very special, indeed: a musical instrument that symbolizes the joy and peaceful yearnings of an entire culture. It's gratifying to know that the instrument lives on so its music can enrich our own age. Give a listen:

Is it Art - Or is it Mo' Money?

The reliable Scotman.com from -- where else? -- Scotland, has the latest update on the red hot market for modern Asian artwork:

"Art collectors, dealers and auction houses are increasingly looking east for inspiration and investment opportunities, eying the rising stars of Asian painting as well as the region's super-rich patrons.
* * *
"Asian art's ascendancy in recent years has been spectacular, with contemporary artists seeing prices for their work soar."

Everyone's favorite example de jour is mentioned -- Zhang Xiaogang's bleak "Tiananmen Square." Originally estimated to sell at Cristy's Hong Kong auction last autumn for $257,069 to $385,604, the winning bidder actually paid $2.3 million plus, one assumes, the usually hefty buyer's premium.

It's no knock against Zhang's painting to say that someone got taken, badly. Conning the rich into over-paying for the latest fashion in the art world is a marketing ploy as old and disreputable as any stock swindle on Wall Street.

Now, we are told, the market already is tiring of Chinese modernists and is moving on to India. Also last fall, a Tyeb Mehta acrylic, "Mahishasura," sold for more than $1.5 million.

A gallery owner is quoted as saying --

"There were some Western collectors who had got into contemporary Chinese art which has seen a gigantic runup in the last year or two.

"Some were saying 'What's next?', and contemporary Indian art seems to represent a certain value opportunity and creatively a certain strength."

It won't be long before India's artists are abandoned, too, and auction houses start hyping artists from some other clime like Yemen or maybe Tierra del Fuego. Sounds like typical stock churning, doesn't it? Art collecting as the equivalent of a Kwakiutl potlatch, where the rich throw their money away to prove just how rich they are.

The whole business reminds us of critic Peter Schjeldahl's pointed observation in The New Yorker not long ago. Speaking of a U.S. artist who enjoys a certain momentary popularity in New York, he wrote:

"Great artists work from and for history, where no one lives. Kiki Smith, the subject of a tangy retrospective at the Whitney ... is a major figure ... who makes minor art."

The real trick is to collect "major art" that you like and pay no attention to the reputation-at-the-moment of the artist.

Bad Lawyer Joke

Bad lawyers never really retire. They just lose touch with their art:

"It is alleged that Mardirosian maintained possession of the stolen artwork in Massachusetts until 1988, when he moved the paintings to Monaco and later to a Swiss bank for safekeeping. It is alleged that Mardirosian intended to return the stolen paintings to their owner in exchange for a finder’s fee or 10% of their value. According to the affidavit, Mardirosian was able to keep his possession of the paintings secret by working through lawyers in London, Monaco and Switzerland, as well as a Panamanian shell company he created, Erie International Trading Co. (Erie).

"It is alleged that using the cover of the Panamanian shell company in 1999, Mardirosian attempted to sell the stolen paintings in London. However, an investigation by the Art Loss Register (ALR) determined that the artwork was stolen. ALR is a London-based company that maintains a comprehensive database of stolen artwork.

"The four paintings, “Portrait d’une Jeune Fille” and “Portrait d’un Jeune Homme” by Chaim Soutine, “Maison Rouge” by Maurice Utrillo, and “Flowers” by Maurice de Vlaminck remain in the custody of Sotheby’s Auction house. The remaining two stolen paintings, “Woman Seated” and “Boy” by Jean Jansen are believed to be in the possession of Henri Klein in Switzerland. The indictment seeks the forfeiture of all six pieces of stolen artwork."

Speaking of stolen art, has anyone seen the painting reproduced on the right? Here's another view.

If you've seen it, please let the LAPD know. Or email us and we'll do it for free.

Ephemeral Art

Halliburton isn't the only thing moving to Dubai for the money. Like so much of the art on display at the DIFC Gulf Art Fair, Peter Conrad's review of the exhibits is filled with irony and pokes fun at the Powers That Be.

Moscow Biennale Opens

"Among the pieces on display is a comic photo collage by the Blue Noses group that appears to depict Putin, Osama bin Laden, and President George W. Bush lounging together in boxer shorts like three drunken Russians."

International Herald Tribune, Mar. 9, 2007

The International Tribune today has a review of the "Second Moscow Biennale." [English web site here.]

As Wikipedia accurately describes, the original Biennale art show took place in Venice. Since then, however, a lot of other cities have been getting into the act.

Two years ago, the main venues for the First Moscow Biennale were in the staid and oh-so-official (former) Lenin Museum, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, and the State Tretyakov Gallery, among others. This year, one important venue is in a half-finished wing of the giant Tsum department store:

The art of shopping, rather than art, might be foremost on the minds of shoppers at TSUM, the Moscow department store, but they have a surprise awaiting them as they round the corner from racks of Armani Junior and Miss Blumarine childrenswear.

A nondescript white door opens to a huge concrete hall full of dozens of screens showing continuous American video art in a cacophony of images and sounds. The videos, some offering commentary on consumer culture, are part of the main project of the Second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, which is entitled "Footnotes on Geopolitics, Market, and Amnesia."
* * *
The entire fourth floor of an unfinished new wing of TSUM — with construction workers busily drilling on walls — has been taken over by the biennale, which opened March 1 and runs until April 1.
* * *
The biennale's festive opening on March 1 in the store's cosmetics department featured speeches by Mikhail Shvydkoi, the director of Russia's Federal Culture and Cinematography Agency, a branch of the Culture Ministry, city officials, and a U.S. Embassy representative.

The Russian deputy director of Center for Museums and exhibitions, Joseph Backstein, adds, "The ladies who were shopping probably didn't know what hit them."

Among overtly political videos and other avant-garde works, on display in the satellite venue of the State Trekykov Gallery is a collage by the notorious Blue Noses group. Culture reporter Sophia Kishkovsky writes:

Among the pieces on display is a comic photo collage by the Blue Noses group that appears to depict Putin, Osama bin Laden, and President George W. Bush lounging together in boxer shorts like three drunken Russians. It hangs near a new video installation that includes a recording of Putin's New Year's address to the nation — set to a mocking laugh track.

Russian, American, and Islamic fundamentalist leaders aren't the only targets of the "Sots" art movement, as it is known. South American and Asian politicians, past and present, also come in for their share of send-ups -- including Mao Zedung, Deng Xiaoping, and Zheng Zhimin. Their visages appear in another exhibition titled, somewhat mysteriously, "We Are Your Future."

It might as well have been titled "We Ate Your Future."

Among the Chinese artists participating are Xu Bing, Wang Guangyi, Sui Jianguo, Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, Yan Lei, Ai Weiwei, Chen Wenbo, Liu Xiaodong, Yin Xuizhen, Song Dong, Huang Yan, Peng Yu, Sun Yuan, and Qiu Zhijie.

Political art -- a term some critics deride as meaningless but which nevertheless is a useful way of describing hyper-contemporary works like the Blue Nose painting shown above -- often is fun to see and satisfying on a purely emotional level, particularly for those disaffected with the politics and politicians of their time. Whether it has staying power as fine art is another matter, one that cannot easily be assessed by contemporaries.

Some art movements considered avant-garde in their time retain an appeal and emotional impact far beyond the moment of their creation. One thinks of Picasso's Guernica or Leon Golub's Interrogation III, for example, works of art executed more than a generation ago yet which speak to us in our own time, too.

But art history also is littered with the abandoned carcasses of other political art movements. As Gregory Sholette, who was himself "associated with Political Art Documentation and Distribution, or PAD/D" in the mid-1980's -- puts it in a short essay titled "Snip, Snip, Bang, Bang: Political Art Reloaded", one can name any number of failed art movements in the U.S., alone, that have become "unceremoniously submerged, partially or wholly, beneath the waves of normative art history":

PAD/D, Group Material, the Art Workers Coalition, Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, The Guerilla Art Action Group, Paper Tiger, SPARC, Carnival Knowledge*** The record of their activities now exists within a shadow archive brimming with other examples of anonymous histories, collectivist production, and unrecognized modes of creativity.

Still, even such 'disappeared' movements, as Shollette says, constitute a "phantom archive" with an "off-stage presence" that influences both the culture and artistic expression of future generations and the culture in which they work.

As Oscar Wilde argued a century ago in his famous "Lecture to Art Students," the object of art is "to stir the most divine and remote chords which make music in our souls." Ultimately, art must be judged on its universality of appeal to the basic human condition:

"All good work looks perfectly modern: a piece of Greek sculpture, a portrait of Velasquez -- they are always modern, always of our time."

In one sense, it is appalling to think that the image of Bush, Putin, and Ossama bin Laden cavorting in their underwear might have universal appeal for future generations. But if it releases the chains of artistic expression for artists around the globe, so much the better.

At least it could then be said that George W. Bush did something to make the world a better place.

Discovered Art

Painters on the Brooklyn Bridge

[T]he painters climbed freehand, with no safety equipment in sight, spreading out on the wires as though they were circus performers, or the notes of a jazz riff playing above the skyline.

-- Michelle Preston, New Yorker, Feb 26, 2007

Sometimes real art isn't recognized for what it is until a new generation experiences it with new eyes. Last week's issue of The New Yorker magazine carried a remarkable photo by an unknown photographer of the first third of the Twentieth Century -- Eugene de Salignac.

You haven't heard of him. Hardly anyone has. He may not have heard of himself -- at least not as an artist.

But surely he applied to his work a lively artistic imagination, took as much care, and put into the visual outcome as much effort as any artist. The photo we speak of, reproduced above, was accompanied by a short sidebar written by his great granddaughter, Michelle Preston:

"No one in my family remembered much about my great-grandfather de Salignac. He was divorced from my great-grandmother soon after 1900, and lived the rest of his life alone, in New York City. My mother had a vague idea that he was a stockbroker; as a child, I never even saw a picture of him."

It turns out de Salignac wasn't a stockbroker; he had a job working for the City of New York photographing new construction sites from 1903 to 1934. It was a period, as Ms. Preston says, when "vast reaches of infrastructure were laid down" in the bustling, reborn metropolis.

All of this, his decendants learned when --

"[A] few years ago we received a call from... Michael Lorenzini, of the Municipal Archives of the City of New York. He had been examining a large collection of images—nearly twenty thousand glass negatives and a hundred and thirteen scrapbooks of prints — when he realized that they had all been shot by a single unknown photographer, Eugene de Salignac."

De Salignac's photographs are fascinating, even masterful. And surely they qualify as art, whatever he or his contemporaries may have asssumed.

Now, the best of his photos have been assembled in a new book, “New York Rises” (Aperture Press), and rhe Museum of the City of New York opens an exhibit of de Salignac photographs on May 4.

Yunnan's 'Kodak Moments'

The Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle today has a review of the new exhibit of 51 photographs now on display at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester.

All of the photos were taken by villagers, themselves, in rural Yunnan Province -- although none had ever seen a camera before.

"About 250 farmers, herders, fishermen and others learned how to use Kodak point-and-shoot cameras in a unique project aimed at protecting their region — the most biologically diverse on the planet.

Each month, they received a fresh roll of film and set about capturing the most important events in their everyday lives. Women and men had an equal place behind the viewfinders, unusual in these patriarchal communities.

From the 50,000 images they produced in 2002, 51 were selected for the exhibit. The Photovoice project was supported by the Chinese government, Eastman Kodak Co. and The Nature Conservancy, an international group that protects ecologically important lands."

The show is titled "Voices From South of the Clouds." It will be open to the public in upstate New York through May 28. Then it will become one of Kodak's "traveling exhibitions" available for booking in communities anywhere.

Of the exhibit, staff writer Stuart Low says:

"This touring exhibit is particularly strong in showing centuries-old agricultural and cultural activities in the remote province, which borders Burma, Laos and Vietnam. We see villagers preparing Tibetan butter tea, playing music on a gourd-bamboo pipe and praying to a mountain god.

Some of their trades seem exotic — for example, fishing with leashed cormorants. The fishermen tie a thin rope around the diving bird's neck, allowing it to swallow small fish but not the larger ones, which the fishermen take for themselves.

A more panoramic image depicts 25-year-old Kang Wenming herding sheep on a mountain, high above a bank of luminous purple clouds.

Other activities strike an unexpected modern note. Villagers strum ancient instruments while watching color television or grow native winter vegetables in a state-of-the-art greenhouse.

The spectacular backdrop to these scenes is the region's mountains, forests and headwaters of four major rivers. This is home to rare species such as snow leopards, golden monkeys and black-necked cranes. About 3 million villagers live here, including 15 different ethnic groups.

All of the photos selected are beautifully composed, often with crisp detail and lively color. They are accompanied by the villagers' comments on the scenes."

The unusual project was organized by The Nature Conservancy as part of its Yunnan Great River Project, designed to protect the unique environment of "one of Earth's richest biodiversity hotspots."

For more information or to reserve an exhibition for your community, simply email the Eastman Museum.

Magazine Features USA Artist Delegation to China

South Temple by Zhiwei Tu

The March-April issue of Art of the West, which is just now hitting the news stands, has a 3-page photo feature of the American oil painters delegation that Zhiwei Tu led to China late last year. The feature isn't yet viewable on the Art of the West website. But you can see a preview and read an excerpt on the new Tu Art Gallery web site.

Art History Scholar Dies

Henricus “Harrie” Vanderstappen, long time art history professor at the prestigious University of Chicago, died a month ago at the age of 86.

He was a war refugee, Catholic priest, China missionary, art scholar, a popular teacher, and world class authority on Asian art. The university newspaper, Chicago Chronicle, has the details of his eventful life.

Born in The Netherlands, Vanderstappen barely escaped imprisonment by the Nazis while a seminary student. "At one point during the war, he narrowly escaped capture by the Nazis, hiding with his seminary classmates in a windowless basement for more than 100 days," the Chronicle reports.

After the war he became a Catholic priest and in 1947 was assigned to do missionary work in Beijing.

[T]he art department of Fu Jen Catholic University needed someone to teach art. Vanderstappen obliged. “What I had in mind was missionary work,” he said, years later of this experience. “Instead I was converted —to art.”

Expelled with other foreigners after the Communist Revolution, he enrolled as an art history student at the U of Chicago and earned a Ph.D in 1955, writing his dissertation on art of the Ming period (1368-1644)

Vanderstappen then taught at universities in Germany and Japan before being invited to join the Chicago faculty in 1959. There, he is credited with reviving and completing --

Chinese scholar T.L. Yuan’s effort to catalogue every single piece of Western writing on the art of China. The culmination of this exhaustive project, T.L. Yuan Bibliography of Chinese Art and Architecture," was published in 1975.

After his retirement, the University of Chicago established the Harrie H. Vandertappen Distinguished Professorship in art history, a post currently held by Prof. Wu Hung.