Can't buy me love: artist Wang Sishun
exhibits his sculpture of a vagina made from
a 100rmb note. Photograph: Jonathan Watts
In the latest of his blogs from the Dashanzi International Art Fair, Jonathan Watts finds there's money to be made in the Chinese art scene's current boom.
The theme of this year's Dashanzi contemporary art festival is Beijing, but it might just as easily be money.
Cash is used for political ends by veteran artist, Huang's Rui, whose "Chairman Mao 10,000rmb" spells out Cultural Revolution slogans with banknotes. The same material is exploited by young artist Wang Sishun, who has cut and folded a giant 100rmb note into the shape of a vagina. "Before you couldn't buy anything in China. Money was useless," he explains. "But now it can buy anything, even sex."
It's a case of art imitating life. Reflecting what is happening to the Chinese economy as a whole, a flood of (mostly foreign) cash is pumping up prices and turning the poor, struggling artists of old into wealthy investors in their own works. Visitors used to come to Dashanzi to gawp at the weird and wonderful creations on display; now they are just as likely to be considering an investment in one of the fastest growing asset markets in the country.
One of the most popular events at this year's festival is the Affordable Art Fair, in which hundreds of works have been put on sale for a maximum price of $1,000. That this sum - equivalent to a year's wages for more than half the population - is considered affordable shows how exclusive the market for contemporary art is.
But the base is expanding. As was the case at the start of the manufacturing boom 25 years ago, foreign capital is leading the way in the commercialisation of culture. Gallery owners say that two years ago all contemporary art buyers were foreign. Now more than 20% are Chinese.
Money is now the talk of Dashanzi. "One million dollars, two million dollars, three millions dollars, four millions, five million dollars," says one curator as he counts off five works by Zhang Xiaogang. "The contents of this exhibition room are worth more than the entire district."
His estimate is based on the record price of $979,200 fetched by Zhang's work ''Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 120'' at the first Sotheby's auction of Chinese contemporary art in March. It was more than two times higher than Sotheby's advance estimate and sent a frisson of excitement throughout the Dashanzi art world. "It's been a long wait, but it's all worth while now," said one veteran collector. "I could sell just one of my pieces now and buy a house."
Big money is now moving into Dashanzi. The Ullens Project - one of Europe's leading art museums - is preparing to establish a giant new facility in the district, complete with theatre and exhibition rooms. Last week, the New York-based Artists Pension Trust announced that it has signed up 22 of China's top artists to a scheme that will see them invest one piece of work per year for the next 20 years into a mutual fund that they can draw upon in old age. "It is a mixture of hardnosed capitalism and mutually-supporting socialism," said president David Ross, the former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Saatchi brothers are rumoured to have sent scouts to Dashanzi, and the Tate Modern is scouring the Chinese contemporary art for an exhibition next spring. It is a golden age for the district.
But not everyone is happy with the boom. Two British-based performance artists - Cai Yuan and JJ Xi - sought to criticize the district's over-commercialisation yesterday by charging visitors 10rmb to jump up and down on a bed flanked by security guards It was a play on their 1999 intervention at the Tate Modern, when they leaped on Tracy Emin's bed before being hauled off by police. Recreated and updated in Beijing, the performance appeared to bemuse most spectators. The largely Chinese audience may have had more money than in the past, but none of them were willing to part with it.
