China's art scene burns red-hot

GALLERIES GALORE | Contemporary artists find strong new following

SHANGHAI -- The black Mercedes-Benz sedan, shiny and new, begged for attention as it sat curbside in front of a dingy red, dilapidated, two-story apartment building, where laundry hung from clotheslines across weathered front doors.

Across the street Xin Fu made for a jarring juxtaposition. Smartly dressed in a snazzy vintage, black Chanel dress, fancy Wolford stockings and red suede designer handbag, as if going out for an evening on the town although it wasn't even noon on a Saturday, she looked as out of place in Suzhou Creek as the unattended luxury car. Yet both symbolized what the area has become in recent years.

Not long ago Suzhou Creek was full of abandoned factories, run down and unoccupied since the 1980s. But now the area, just 20 minutes by taxi from the happening Bund, Shanghai's famous waterfront street, attracts tourists -- and serious collectors -- eager to check out the slew of art galleries hoping to capitalize on the explosion of China's contemporary art scene, which Chicago's Zhou Brothers were at the forefront of two decades ago.

Recent reports claim the Chinese art market is estimated to be worth about $36 billion a year when everything from ceramics to modern pop art is taken into account, making the industry just another one of China's hot commodities. Next summer its capital, Beijing, hosts the Olympics. Drawing about 200,000 foreign travelers daily, China is expected to be the No. 1 tourist destination by 2020, according to the United Nation's World Tourism Organization.

While sites such as the Great Wall, Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square in Beijing and the Shanghai Museum, Nanjing Road and the Bund in Shanghai draw throngs of foreign spectators, art galleries in Shanghai and Beijing offer another interesting stop for the culturally-aware tourist.

Reminiscent of London's Notting Hill and New York City's SoHo in their infancy stages as artsy communities, Suzhou Creek and the adjoining M50 Art District have turned into an artistic milieu with studios and galleries. One of the more recent additions is six-month-old Fuxin Gallery, owned by Fu, a blue-eyed Shanghai native married to an Italian with homes here, London and Rome.

I had met her a couple of nights earlier at a weekly aperitif gathering at Shanghai's Westin hotel, where the property's general manager, Peter Alatsas, introduced us. Fu's husband bragged that his wife, a professor at Shanghai University's College of Economics & Management, was preparing to open a gallery in Suzhou Creek. When she asked to show me around the area, I couldn't resist. It's one thing to take a taxi solo to a foreign destination and wander around aimlessly. It's another to have a local such as Fu as your guide.

I exited my taxi, paid the 23 yuan fare (about $3) and spotted Fu, who took me to meet one of her artists, Hebin, a bespectacled, 27-year-old male artist whose tiny studio sits on the bank of Suzhou Creek. One of his most captivating paintings showed large, smiling faces of two young girls in back of tiny images of a gun-toting man dressed in a Chinese guard uniform and a panda bear with a dangerous grin and wearing a shirt with a five-point red star, which symbolizes Communism. In my mind, it was a political statement against still-Communist China.

Our next stop was ShanghART gallery, regarded as one of the country's most acclaimed and innovative spaces for art. Fu introduced me to its founder, Lorenz Helbing, from Switzerland.

When ShanghART opened in 1996 as the city's first independent gallery for contemporary art, the exhibition was on a few walls in a local hotel. Now ShanghART shows works by 30 artists from different media, including video to ink and painting to photo, in an enormous gallery opened in 2005 and debuted a smaller exhibition space in 2004 in the M50 Art District, right next to Suzhou Creek. Although the gallery works with artists from all over China, it focuses on artists in Shanghai, such as Zhang Enli's, whose work most impressed me. Here, pieces go for $2,000 to $500,000 and attract serious collectors.

ShanghART and Art Scene Warehouse, owned by Canadian Sami Wafa, were among the first galleries in the area. Since then, dozens of other galleries have followed. When we strolled around the area I saw just one coffee shop but I imagine in time there will be quite a selection, just like in Factory 798, Beijing's well-known contemporary art district whose name comes from its original home: No. 798 Electronics Factory, a former weapons factory converted into a complex of studios, workshops and galleries beginning in 2002.

While Suzhou Creek is manageable in a day, it might take a week to get through the hundreds of galleries at 798.

One of the latest tenants to move into 798, and with much fanfare, is the whopping 86,000-square-foot Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, a not-for-profit independent art center that includes three galleries, a shop, cafe, auditorium, library and more. Bookstores, ceramics shops, an accessories boutique, cafes and restaurants with signs in English surprisingly, also make up the district.

With 798 bursting at the seams with tourists, artists have moved farther away to Caochangdi Village, still so unknown that even my driver had difficulty finding it even though it is a short drive from 798.

Seven years ago Ai Weiwei, one of China's finest artists, moved there and opened the gallery China Art Archives and Warehouse. A community was born, giving credence to the saying, "If you build it, they will come."

Vanguard photographer Rong Rong recently opened his 14,000-square-foot Three Shadows photography studio. Helbing plans to open an outpost, called ShanghART@Beijing, before the year is up.

F2 Gallery, owned by Belgian Fabien Fryns, debuted two years ago. Although F2 shows about 60 percent Chinese art and 40 percent Western, the former accounts for 90 percent of its sales.

Many Chinese artists are far from starving as prices have soared for their works. Helbing says five years ago $10,000 might have been a high price but now $100,000 is common.

Fryns, who has been in the art gallery business for 20 years and moved to Beijing in 2004 after working in London and Spain, says there has been a 2,000 percent increase in the prices of top quality works by Chinese artists.

He also is of the opinion that the top tier of contemporary Chinese artists, such as Zhang Xiaogang, Yui Minjun and Zheng Fanzhi, are on the same level as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.

Today's Chinese artists can thank the Zhou Brothers, who were pioneers. Shan Zhou says neither he nor his brother DaHuang Zhou are surprised at the growth of contemporary art in China. The brothers, who were born in China in the 1950s, studied drama and painting at the University of Shanghai and the National Academy for Arts and Crafts in Beijing, where they earned MFAs and became leaders of China's contemporary art movement before moving to Chicago in 1986.

"We are happy to see the growth," Shan Zhou says. "It's about time. In the '80s, the more important artists left China. They were looking for more freedom."

They say today's Chinese artists are much more aggressive than those 15 years ago. Previously, artists stayed in their countryside provinces hoping a foreign art collector happened upon their work. Now they go to Shanghai and Beijing to make it happen for themselves. DaHuang Zhou says there's a Chinese expression that translates to once in 100 years and that is how he describes today's movement.

The duo recently spent a month in China, where a retrospective exhibition "Zhou Brothers: 30 Years of Collaboration," which was shared by the Elmhurst Art Museum and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs three years ago, was on display at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. In September they gave a well-attended lecture at Beijing University called "From Fantasy to Reality."

"China today is fully open and in the spotlight," DaHuang Zhou said. "All the attention is on it in every field. Contemporary art has a very special advantage. Today's China is more open politically and in many different ways they have much better conditions than any other artists from any other place. I'm very excited for that."