Look East, Hans!


“Made-in-China breaks the bank”—that was the headline of an article in Le Figaro on January 12 about prices for Chinese painters on the contemporary art market in Hong Kong. A work by Zhang Xiaogang had just fetched a record price of $2.3 million dollars at Christie’s.
Some more prices cited by Le Figaro: $902,641 for a Fang Lijun, $807,197 for a Zeng Fanzhi. And Yan Pei-Ming, the most French of all Chinese artists, beat all Gaulish painters with $585,660 at Christie’s London. This market is apparently supported by numerous Chinese businessmen.
Shortly before these results came through there was a documentary on French TV made by a crew who managed to record the life of young women working in a Chinese garment factory. Most are from the country. They are housed in insalubrious dormitories on the factory site and a working day can be as long as fifteen or seventeen hours. They do not know when they will be paid or how much. There is no right to strike in China.
As a French dealer told Le Figaro, “China is experiencing a wave of euphoria that is carrying business, art, literature and projects in general as it looks forward to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and the 2010 World Fair in Shanghai.”
Zhenchen Liu is a young Chinese artist currently at the Le Fresnoy art school whose works are not on the market. His film Shanghai Shanghai is a montage of virtual images touting the development program to developers and tourists and presenting the city as it will be when building is finished, with images of the construction sites taken by the artist himself, showing how whole neighborhoods are being destroyed as their inhabitants are expelled, and sometimes even before they get out! We see a woman busy in her kitchen with, on one side, a blank space where the wall used to be.
The title of the Zhang Xiaogang painting that fetched $2.3 million is -Tiananmen Square. The buyer is said to be an Asian collector.
According to one of Xiaogang’s first French collectors (speaking, again, to Le Figaro), in these paintings by Chinese artists “which to us may sometimes seem mute, completely empty, there can be as many as five different levels of meaning.”
Xiaogang is best known for his portraits, but Tiananmen Square is utterly devoid of human figures. Of course, in 1989 the Chinese authorities did “clear” the area by sending in the tanks against the student protestors, killing 1,400 and wounding 10,000. Those rebels who were arrested were sentenced to death. And today, any evocation of what happened there is still censored in the People’s Republic of China.
In Zhenchen Liu’s film, we hear a man with a bandage on his face telling us that the army is sent in whenever the population refuses to budge so as to ensure that the city’s construction program stays on schedule.
Readers may recall those works by Hans Haacke revealing the -exploitation and repression on which the fortunes of some big Western collectors (Ludwig, Cartier) were built. Mr. Haacke, there is huge scope for such investigations out East.

Catherine Millet

Translation, C. Penwarden