Berlin Has a New Art Fair. Can It Attract the Buyers?
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Désiré Feuerle’s private museum features striking juxtapositions: A 10th-century Khmer religious statue is set alongside a mirror sculpture by British artist Anish Kapoor.CreditThe Feuerle Collection
“This is my favorite view,” enthused Désiré Feuerle. He was peering through the subterranean gloom of a former Nazi telecommunications bunker where a 10th-century Khmer statue of Vishnu was juxtaposed with an Anish Kapoor mirror sculpture embedded in wartime concrete.
“I love standing down here alone to enjoy this,” continued Mr. Feuerle, a German art collector whose private museum was one of the more distinctive attractions of the sixth annual Berlin Art Week, which closed on Sunday.
Mr. Feuerle likes surprise juxtapositions. On the lower floor, entered through pitch darkness to a John Cage soundtrack, medieval Cambodian sculpture is combined with contemporary works by Mr. Kapoor and the erotica photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Upstairs, Chinese furniture from the Qing dynasty stands next to conceptual art by Cristina Iglesias and James Lee Byars.
“My collection is very refined and elegant; Berlin is the opposite” said Mr. Feuerle, a former Cologne gallerist, who spends much of his year in Asia.
The Feuerle Collection, first opened by-appointment last April, was one of about 15 private museums included in Berlin Art Week. The program aimed to give art worlders a second compelling reason to visit the German capital (the well-established Gallery Weekend every April attracts a conspicuously international audience).
The centerpiece of the week was a new art fair at Station Berlin, a postindustrial exhibition venue. Art Berlin, featured 112 galleries, almost 80 percent of which were based in Germany. The event, owned and co-organized by the owners of the Art Cologne, replaced the gallery-run Art Berlin Contemporary (ABC), which for the previous nine years had struggled to market large-scale artists’ projects within the commercial context of a fair.
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Art Berlin featured work from 112 galleries, almost 80 percent of them based in Germany.CreditCarsten Koall/European Pressphoto Agency
“There’s a perception that people will come to a fair in Berlin, but they won’t buy,” said London-based Pippy Houldsworth, one of just five exhibitors with galleries in Britain or the United States. “In the current global climate, some dealers were nervous about trying a new fair.”
Ms. Houldsworth said that Art Berlin’s owners had managed to bring in collectors from Germany’s more affluent Rhineland region, as well as from Belgium and the Netherlands. The fair attracted 33,000 visitors, according to the organizers.
“They wanted to bring in a new audience, and that did happen,” Ms. Houldsworth said. She said she had made five sales, including the 2017 painting “Yellow Siller,” by Uwe Henneken — a Berlin-based artist much preoccupied with Shamanism, who was also on show at the Sammlung Boros private museum. Priced at 12,000 euros, or about $14,400, it sold to a German collector.
The organizers made a deliberate effort to keep the costs relatively low, enabling younger galleries to show works by emerging names at approachable prices.
The Berlin dealer Katharina Maria Raab said smaller booths had cost exhibitors about €4,000. Ms. Raab, who opened her gallery in 2015, was showing a concrete and steel relief, inscribed in Arabic “Do you want freedom?” by Manaf Halbouni, a Syrian-born artist based in Dresden. In February, Mr. Halbouni stirred controversy in that city with his sculpture “Monument,” made from three upturned buses, like barricades in war-torn Aleppo. His much smaller piece at the fair, whose exposed barbed wire and concrete stressing rods had a special resonance in postwar Berlin, sold to another German buyer, priced at €7,000.
“It was so much better compared to last year,” a local collector, Gudrun Wurlitzer, said of Art Berlin. “You didn’t know if ABC was an exhibition or a fair.”
Mrs. Wurlitzer and her husband, Bernd, were also part of the Berlin Art Week program, showing works by younger artists at their “Pied-à-Terre Collection” in a communist-era apartment block featured in the 2006 movie “The Lives of Others.” A silk-and-wool carpet, “The Empty Space,” designed by the Berlin artist Sultan Acar attracted admirers. Woven in Nepal in 2016, the carpet lyrically evokes a vacant rectangle of pavement in Berlin on which an equestrian statue of Kaiser Friedrich III once stood.
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Sultan Acar’s 2016 carpet, “The Empty Space,” together with sculptures by Raphaela Vogel and a painting by Christian Jankowski at the Wurlitzer “Pied-à-Terre Collection” in Berlin.CreditWurlitzer PTC
It is available for sale, priced at €25,000, on the Wurlitzers’ “Artitious” website, typifying the more fluid relationship evolving in Berlin among artists, collectors and commerce.
“There are two art scenes in Berlin,” Ms. Wurlitzer said. “There is an official one, and there is another scene in which artists hold pop-up shows, share exhibitions and self-market themselves. We’re trying to create an online forum which brings both scenes closer.”
Berlin remains a city of artists. The city’s reputation for being “poor but sexy” might be under threat from gentrification, mass tourism and the gig economy, but about 8,000 artists are still registered with the city’s specialist social insurance plan, the Künstlersozialkasse, according to Ute Weiss Leder, a spokeswoman for the Professional Association of Berlin Visual Artists.
What can yet another contemporary art fair do for them?
Not much, said Marta Gnyp, an art writer and adviser, who lives in the city. “I wonder whether Berlin needs an international fair,” she said. She pointed out that Gallery Weekend was already very successful at attracting foreign collectors. “With the busy international art calendar, they won’t visit Berlin twice a year,” she said, adding that she thought Art Berlin could work well as a more modestly focused “regional” fair.
Over-ambition has become something of a hot topic in the German art scene after Documenta14, the sprawling contemporary exhibition, ran into financial trouble and required a government bailout. And with the upper levels of the international art market becoming increasingly homogenized, there is growing appreciation of regional events — if it is a region where something interesting is happening.
“In all the internationally oriented fairs like Art Basel and Frieze, you see the big names you find everywhere,” said Mr. Feuerle, the globe-trotting Berlin museum owner. “I don’t see too much local art from the country, which to me is boring, as I come to see and explore something different and new.”
Berlin is a city with plenty of artists trying to say something new. Art Berlin could gain the reputation as the fair to discover them.
In Europe and Canada, New Looks for Classic Hotels
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A lobby lounge at the Palace Hotel in Switzerland.CreditBürgenstock Hotels AG
In 1832 when Adare Manor in rural County Limerick in the west of Ireland was built, lighting was often by candles, air-conditioning meant opening the windows and 39,000 acres of land buffered the grand house, called a “Calendar House” for its 52 chimneys and 365 leaded-glass windows. Sold by its heirs in the early 1980s, Adare Manor reopened in 1988 as a country house hotel with the kind of architectural frippery in sculptural embellishments and coffered ceilings that make an audience of guests.
Such historic hotels, often clad in carved stone and wood, still make an opulent first impression, but to attract travelers today, reliant on Wi-Fi and accustomed to easily accessible USB plugs beside the beds, older hotels often must adapt to survive, which accounts for a spate of recent and upcoming revivals in Europe and North America, including Adare Manor, set to preserve those handsome old bones while updating their marrow.
“Between architecture and location, historic hotels have advantages,” said Bjorn Hanson, a clinical professor at New York University’s Jonathan M. Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism. “For travelers looking to experience something genuine and cultural, these are the ultimate response to those trends.”
Closed since January 2016, Adare Manor will reopen in November after an expansion to add a 42-room wing to the estate, bringing the number of rooms to 104. The castle-like hotel will also get a new La Mer spa, two new restaurants, a 27-seat cinema and an 18-hole golf course designed by Tom Fazio (rooms from €325, or about $388, including breakfast). The classic natural appeal of the estate, long ago downsized to 840 acres including walled gardens, walking trails and falcon training, will remain untouched.
Even when they are purpose-built as hotels, historic versions often contain excessive dining venues (for example, the breakfast room). Elements that were luxuries back in the day, such as elevators, may be outdated. Meanwhile, contemporary demand for electrical outlets mandates extensive rewiring, and thick walls may require multiple repeaters to maintain steady internet service.
In Switzerland, the 113-year-old Palace Hotel, one of four hotels in the Bürgenstock Resort overlooking Lake Lucerne, was stripped to its exterior walls in an eight-year restoration culminating in its reopening in August. Its ornamental plasterwork and faux marble pillars were refurbished and replaced along with some 200 original artworks, including paintings by Picasso and Klimt. Its 108 rooms, with marble bathrooms and updated technology, have views of the lake and the nearby Alps (rooms from CHF 440, or $458).
“Previous generations of owners were passionate about architecture, and we felt it was important to honor that tradition,” said Bruno Schopfer, the managing director of Katara Hospitality Switzerland Ltd., which owns the resort. Given its age, he added, “Our guiding philosophy has been, ‘the future has a past.’”
Rome’s 1889-vintage Hotel Eden reopened in April after a 17-month renovation. The updated hotel, in the heart of the city close to the Spanish Steps, reduced the number of rooms from 121 to 98, enlarging them. The property, run by the Dorchester Collection, now hosts a top-floor restaurant with panoramic views, as well as a four-treatment-room spa with a blow-dry bar for hair styling (rooms from €785).
In Victoria, British Columbia, the Fairmont Empress, originally opened in 1908, celebrated its reopening in June after a two-year, $60 million makeover, introducing a new reception lobby, porte cochere and a restaurant and bar devoted to Pacific Northwest cuisine. Its spa and pool were remodeled as were its 464 rooms (rooms from $299 Canadian).
Among future reinventions, the 1910-vintage Hotel Lutetia in Paris, originally built by the department store Le Bon Marche and closed since 2014 for renewal, is expected to reopen by year end. The current owners, the Set hotel group, plan to introduce 184 guest rooms, a jazz bar, a spa with six treatment rooms and a swimming pool and a bi-level brasserie at the repurposed address (rooms from €690).
From left, Kan Xuan, Yu Hong, Sun Yuan, Peng Yu and Qiu Zhijie are in the Guggenheim exhibition “Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World.” The backdrop is Qiu Zhijie’s ink-on-paper “Map of Theater of the World,” commissioned for the show.CreditGilles Sabrié for The New York Times
BEIJING — The signature work at “Art and China After 1989,” a highly anticipated show that takes over the Guggenheim on Oct. 6, is a simple table with a see-through dome shaped like the back of a tortoise. On the tabletop hundreds of insects and reptiles — gekkos, locusts, crickets, centipedes and cockroaches – mill about under the glow of an overhead lamp.
During the three-month exhibition some creatures will be devoured; others may die of fatigue. The big ones will survive. From time to time, a New York City pet shop will replenish the menagerie with new bugs.
In its strange way, the piece, called “Theater of the World,” created in 1993 by the conceptual artist Huang Yong Ping, perfectly captures the theme of the exhibition: China as a universe unto itself, forever evolving and changing into a new order. It also sums up a sense of oppression the artists felt from 1989 to 2008, as they were making these works.
Many of the more than 70 creators were born in China, yet like Mr. Huang — who fled the country in dismay after the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters on Tiananmen Square — they reject the label “Chinese.” One paradox: The artists appreciate the big splash on Fifth Avenue but express mixed feelings about a nation-themed show. Most consider themselves international artists who have contributed mightily to the global avant-garde art movement.
“Whether artists are Chinese or French is not important,” said Mr. Huang, who lives and works outside Paris. “I think the duty of the artist is to deconstruct the concept of nationality. There is going to be a day when there is no concept of nationality.”
The curators have selected nearly 150 pieces of sometimes shocking, often scruffy experimental art — video, installation, photography, performance — that questions authority, and uses animals (on screen) to highlight the violence of humankind. (“Theater of the World” caused a stir in Vancouverin 2007 when Mr. Huang included scorpions and tarantulas; he withdrew the piece from the show there rather than comply with requests to remove those particular creatures.)
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Huang Yong Ping’s “Theater of the World,” which features live insects and reptiles.CreditHuang Yong Ping/Guggenheim Abu Dhabi
The emphasis at the Guggenheim is on conceptual art. There are few oil paintings, and none of the flashy visages of big faces of the political pop school of the 1990s and early 2000s that fetched skyhigh prices at auction.
”We felt the whole concept of contemporary Chinese art needed to be exploded,” said Alexandra Munroe, the lead curator.
The chronology covers two distinct periods: the political repression after Tiananmen and the economic boom in the 2000s. In the aftermath of the protests, the government banned installation art. That provoked conceptual artists to stage furtive shows in anonymous apartments. Artists struggled. Many escaped abroad, came back, went out again. There were almost no galleries and little money to be made.
By 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization, opening its doors to the global economy, the government understood that art could be China’s calling card. Money poured into places like the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Commercial galleries popped up in Beijing and Shanghai.
The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games were staged as China’s coming out party. Many artists dismissed the celebration, preferring to concentrate on government corruption and the demolition of charming old Beijing. But the Games did help to open the eyes of outsiders to China and its art scene.
Soon after the opening at the Guggenheim, the Communist Party will hold its national congress in Beijing, a conclave set to anoint the current president, Xi Jinping, for a second term. The uninhibited avant-garde art at the Guggenheim will offer a jagged contrast to Mr. Xi’s stiff internetcensorship, and repression of human rights that keeps some of China’s artists — including perhaps the best known, Ai Weiwei — from living and working in their homeland.
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Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s “Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other,” a seven-minute video with eight American pit bulls on eight treadmills.CreditGalleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Les Moulins, Habana
Only nine female artists appear in the show, a poor representation that the curators say they are acutely aware of. One of the nine, though, is Xiao Lu, who achieved notoriety when she fired a pellet gun at a sculpture at a Beijing exhibition in 1989.
The few works by women is a reflection of the male-dominated government-run art academies of the period, Ms. Munroe said. The teachers were mostly men who wielded disproportionate influence with their power to dole out studio spaces, video equipment and paints. Most of the students were men. Now some classes are evenly split between men and women.
“That source of livelihood was closed to a privileged few, and the few were men exclusively,” Ms. Munroe said. “The good news is that it has changed.”
Some of the artists in Beijing and Hangzhou looked back at their work in the show, the atmosphere during those two decades and how they and the country have changed.
Peng Yu and Sun Yuan
They are known as the bad couple of China’s art. Peng Yu, 43, and Sun Yuan, 45, her husband, work in adjacent studios in Beijing’s thriving 798 Art District. Three heavy-duty motorcycles are parked outside Mr. Sun’s door. Inside, skeletons of a lion, a boar, a griffin and a few other animals decorate the shelves. Ms. Peng’s space is smaller, more spartan and contains a bare-bones kitchen.
In 2000, they attracted attention with a performance piece, “Body Link,” at a show in Shanghai. Both artists took part in a transfusion of their own blood into the corpse of Siamese twins. The piece was created just after they decided to get married and was “a special kind of coming together,” Ms. Peng said.
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Xu Bing’s “A Case Study of Transference,” 1994. The artwork originally featured live pigs, their backs stamped with gibberish. The Guggenheim settled for a video of the Beijing performance.CreditXu Bing
Ms. Peng revels in her brazen politically incorrect attitudes. The fuss about too few female artists in the Guggenheim show was unjustified. “Personally I think female artists in China are not as hard-working as male artists and their art is not as good as male artists,” she said.
The couple’s work at the Guggenheim is one of their less radical pieces. The seven-minute video shows four pairs of American pit bulls tethered to eight wooden treadmills. The camera closes in on the animals as they face each other, running at high speed. The dogs are prevented from touching one another, a frustrating experience for animals trained to fight. The dogs get wearier and wearier, their muscles more and more prominent, and their mouths increasingly salivate.
The piece was first shown with the actual dogs appearing before an audience at the Today Museum in Beijing in 2003.
“The piece was so special, it stood out,” Ms. Peng said. “The art critics didn’t know what to say.”
Xu Bing
Xu Bing, 62, a small wiry figure with long black tangled hair and rimless glasses, is a veteran of China’s conceptual art movement. Early on, he showed that Chinese artists could be at least as provocative as their Western compatriots.
His work, “A Case Study of Transference,” from 1994 illustrates his fascination with the ugly and the primitive versus the beautiful and the classical.
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Xu Bing gathered dust from the 9/11 site in Lower Manhattan for his 2004 artwork “Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?”CreditXu Bing
The original version of the work featured two live pigs — a boar and a sow — having sex in front of audiences at one of the early informal art spaces in Beijing. The backs of the pigs were stamped with gibberish composed from the Roman alphabet and invented Chinese characters.
The Guggenheim drew the line on live pigs in the museum, and settled for a video of the Beijing performance, said Philip Tinari, a guest curator, from the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.
Mr. Xu, who has lived in New York for nearly 20 years, spent time on pig farms during the Cultural Revolution. Why pigs and calligraphy? “Animals are completely uncivilized and Chinese characters are the expression of supreme civilization,” he said.
His second work in the show deals with 9/11. Mr. Xu lives in a townhouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and when the planes hit the World Trade Center, he watched from across the river. A few days later, he went to City Hall and scooped up dust and packed it into a plastic bag.
On the eve of the Guggenheim show he plans to blow the dust from a leaf-catching machine into a small sealed room. The dust will fall on a stencil of a Zen Buddhist stanza.
Of all the artists in the show, Mr. Xu perhaps best straddles China and the West. He was a young teacher at the Art Academy in Beijing during the protests at Tiananmen. His students created the green foam and gypsum “Goddess of Democracy” that became the protest’s symbol for freedom.
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Yu Hong’s “Witness to Growth” series, from 1999 to the present, juxtaposes historical images with self-portraits. Here, “Deng Xiaoping’s Tour in the South of China, ‘China Pictorial,’ P. 2, No. 6, 1992,” with “Twenty-Six Years Old, a Still of the Film ‘The Days,’” showing the artist snipping her hair.CreditYu Hong
“After June 1989, the cultural world became silent, everything became muted, my pieces were not allowed to be shown,” he said over Italian espresso brewed in his studio kitchen in Beijing. He fled in 1990. In the United States, the art schools welcomed him. He moved to New York in 1992 and in 1999 he won a MacArthur Fellowship.
“The relationship between China and the world has changed,” he said. “After 1989, artists stepped out into the world and they worshiped Western culture. Now younger artists want to stay more in China. They get more inspiration from China, there are more problems to explore.”
Yu Hong
When Yu Hong joined the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1984, she was 18 and the only woman among the dozen students in the entering class. It was after the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, and the art schools were coming to life after years in the wilderness.
Ms. Yu, now one of China’s most esteemed realist painters, was an instant star. One of the first assignments for her class was to draw Michelangelo’s David. Ms. Yu’s rendition won first prize. It is still shown to students more than 20 years later.
Her oil painting in the Guggenheim show is entirely different. A self-portrait, the canvas shows Ms. Yu, a few years out of art school in the early 1990s, scissors in hand, snipping her own hair.
The back story is intriguing. Ms. Yu, and her husband, Liu Xiaodong, also an artist, were acting in a low budget movie, called “The Days,” about the couple’s true-life story as impoverished art teachers in a backwater province in northeast China. One of the scenes included Ms. Yu cutting her own hair. The movie was too bleak for the government censors and has never been officially released in China.
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Zhang Peili’s video “Water: Standard Version from the ‘Cihai’ Dictionary,” 1991, depicts the absurdity of the state broadcaster never reporting Tiananmen Square protests.CreditZhang Peili/Guggenheim Abu Dhabi
The self-portrait is part of a historical series she began in 1999 called “Witness to Growth,” in which she paints herself at the various stages of China’s economic growth, juxtaposed against a photograph of the period.
The curators could have chosen a more dramatic work from Ms. Yu. A black and white self-portrait on the wall of her studio in Beijing shows Ms. Yu among the protesters near Tiananmen Square before the tanks rolled in. Adjacent to the canvas is a photograph of the crackdown’s aftermath. Dark smoke hangs over the square. The demonstrators’ tent city is demolished. Soldiers are on watch.
But such photographs are banned in China. A display of the photo overseas would almost certainly draw protests from the Chinese government.
Zhang Peili
A standout work by Zhang Peili, China’s first video artist, shows a female newscaster on China’s state television, CCTV, repeating a meaningless screed about water. The woman, Xing Zhibin, with bouffant hair, and an expressionless middle-aged face from the 1980s and 1990s, was China’s Walter Cronkite.
Mr. Zhang, 60, was shattered, he said, by the end of the democratic movement at Tiananmen Square. “That left a heavy influence on every Chinese person, and it lasts until today,” he said in his small apartment in Hangzhou.
He wanted to find a way to depict the absurdity of the state broadcaster never reporting the monumental event on the square.
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Kan Xuan’s video “Kan Xuan! Ai!” catches glimpses of her running through a subway tunnel.CreditKan Xuan
A friend of the artist contacted Ms. Xing and suggested that she read the definition of water many times over.
“I lied and let my friend pass on the message that I was doing an education project about water,” he said. “I still don’t know if she knew that this video of her was actually used for a contemporary art piece.”
Mr. Zhang is one of the most influential art teachers in China. He detects less political restlessness among the new generation of students, who are impressed by the new consumer-driven economy.
Still, the huge gap between the rich and the not-so-rich in China is a recipe for future unrest, he said. But for the moment, he went on: “I procrastinate. Society is procrastinating. There is a lot to be done to change society but mostly we just skip it and wait.”
Kan Xuan
Visitors climb six flights of stairs to reach Kan Xuan’s studio overlooking the red tiled roof of Beijing’s ancient Confucius Temple. On a wooden table rests her laptop and a monitor. There is little art on the walls and no signs of her video works. “I like video because it disappears,” she said. “It doesn’t hang around.”
Ms. Kan’s two videos in the show are from 1999, and more personal in style than that of her mentor, Zhang Peili. The first, “Kan Xuan! Ai!” catches glimpses of her as she runs through a subway tunnel, weaving in and out among the commuters.
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In Qiu Zhijie’s video “Assignment No.1: Copying the ‘Orchid Pavilion Preface’ 1000 Times,” 1990-1995, the artist nearly obliterates a classic calligraphy text.CreditQiu Zhijie
In the second piece, “Post-Sense Sensibility,” Ms. Kan surveys an underground art exhibition held in a basement on the outskirts of Beijing. The show was an exuberant, anything-goes outburst of installation art that surfaced after the sullen post-Tiananmen period.
Ms. Kan’s hand-held camera captures the outrageous art — pig intestines strung from the ceiling, a stillborn fetus lying next to a human face poking through a bed of ice. Art lovers crowd around the installations, hungry for a new era of unfettered expression.
The documentary is important for the sake of history, Ms. Kan, 45, said. But she long ago moved on.
Her more recent video work focuses on the tombs of Chinese emperors and their courtiers. She has traveled to the far reaches of China, often trekking up mountains to capture the emperors’ remains. “When I was traveling I told myself: ‘See what you see and feel what you feel.’ I have used simple techniques.”
Ms. Kan was one of four female artists for the 2007 Venice Biennale but she doesn’t care, she said, about gender politics. What’s more important, she pointed out, was to remain independent of the commercial galleries. Unable to survive on her creative videos, she has often taken jobs in high-end commercial film production, including filming luxury sports cars on treks from Beijing to northern Italy.
Even though her themes dwell on China, she considers herself an international artist and lives between Beijing and Amsterdam. “I only choose to be in shows where the curators and the artists work hard,” she said, “whether it’s Chinese artists or not.”
A vast multipaneled ink on paper map by Qiu Zhijie, one of the pioneers of China’s contemporary art world, is the only new work in the exhibition.
Over the years, Mr. Qiu has drawn outsized maps that combine fantasy with politics. The Guggenheim commissioned a map that juxtaposed Chinese and global events with the unfolding contemporary art scene in Beijing and Shanghai.
A master calligrapher, Mr. Qiu, 48, learned the discipline of painting characters as a child. His spidery writings, in English and Chinese characters, scrawl across the map that traces the torturous path from Mao to Xi Jinping. Some may see the work’s style as resembling Saul Steinberg’s maps for The New Yorker.
A figure who straddles the establishment and the fringes, Mr. Qiu works in a cavernous studio outside Beijing. He was still putting finishing touches to the map just weeks before the show’s opening. “Coca-Cola back to China, Star Wars, Ronald Reagan,” he said, reading out some of the early references.
The map seems politically safe: The Tiananmen Square crackdown is referred to as an “incident,” buried in small print. One milestone seems unintentionally pointed in its misspelling. “Reunifiction of HK” reads a phrase, a reference to the Chinese government’s plans for reunification of Hong Kong with the mainland. The banner “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” is strung across the top of the map, a motif that should please the government.
Mr. Qiu has been criticized in China’s social media for leading a government-run academy. “A lot of infuriated netizens say I am bribed by the government,” he said. “But if we didn’t teach in the art institutions how are the younger artists going to be trained?”
The variety and rebelliousness of the works from the ’90s and the early 2000s were long overdue for exposure at a mainstream Western museum, he said.
“The art I see here in Beijing is totally different to what I see in New York,” he said. “The big face school of painting gave a fake image of what Chinese art is. The Guggenheim will correct the image.”
