Vogue for Treating Art as Stocks Comes to China

By Louise Chen

Originally published on artinfo.com, July 16, 2010

http://fr.blouinartinfo.com/features/article/35237-vogue-for-treating-art-as-stocks-comes-to-china

In the latest sign that money is continuing to flow rapidly into the Chinese contemporary art market, a financial corporation has gone public with China's first openly traded art portfolio, on the Shenzhen Cultural Assets and Equity Exchange (SZCAEE).

Issued by the Shenzhen Artvip Cultural Corporation, the art portfolio comprises 12 paintings by contemporary artistYangPeijiang in the form of 1,000 shares, which sold out on the first day of trading, netting $354,480. As the artworks are traded by Artvip, which is managing the 12 works, profits are dispersed to shareholders.

Established in 2009 by the Chinese government, SZCAEE functions as an alternative platform for the trading of a wide range of cultural assets — including artworks, luxury goods, and films — as part of the Chinese government's attempt to commercialize, diversify, and regulate the public exchange of such cultural properties. SZCAEE plans to offer a second 1000-share portfolio, featuring 40 works by Yang Peijiang, sometime in the future.

Companies packaging art as an alternative-investment vehicle have struggled over the past year. In December 2009, Artistic Investment Advisers, a London-based group established in 2007 that billed itself as the world's first "art hedge fund," closed. At the time, the consulting group Fine Art Wealth Management estimated that the number of global art funds had declined by 40 percent since the September 2009 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.

Strength in Numbers: A Preview of the 2010 Setouchi International Art Festival

By Louise Chen

Originally published on artinfo.com, July 12, 2010

http://uk.blouinartinfo.com/features/article/35187-strength-in-numbers-a-preview-of-the-2010-setouchi-international-art-festival

For those art-loving globetrotters seeking to escape the unbearable heat, Japan can offer a getaway to its tranquil Naoshima Island and the six adjacent islands, on which the inaugural Setouchi International Art Festival 2010 is kicking off on July 19, and running through October 31.

Dubbed “the 100-day Art and Sea Adventure,” the festival honors Japan’s island lifestyle and culture while simultaneously presenting outstanding recent art and architectural works to an international audience. Featuring 76 artists and their projects, the exhibitions will be dispersed on the Seven Islands of the Seto Inland Sea: Naoshima, Teshima, Megijima, Oijima, Shodoshima, Oshima, and Inujima.

Over the years, the Seven Islands have become a focal point of contemporary art in Japan. Aspiring to turn one secluded island into a cultural hub, the former mayor of Naoshima, with the help of the Fukutake family, founded the Benesse House Museum, a space designed to highlight the interaction between art, architecture, and the natural environment.

Known for its idyllic seaside vistas, Naroshima Island, with a population of 3,400, covers an area of 7.81 square kilometers. On the 17th, an opening reception will be held on the island for the newly launched Lee Ufan Museum, designed by prominent Japanese architect Ando Tadao. One major exhibition on Naroshima is Hiroshi Sugimotos 2002 Appropriate Proportion project, a life-size replica of his former neighborhood’s wooden Go’o Shino Shrine, installed on a stretch of pebble road.

Not far from the shrine stands the American artist Teresita Fernandezs Blind Blue Landscape, a curved wall embedded with thousands of shards of mirror, each of which reflects a fragment of the surrounding landscape.

On Teshima Island, Olafur Eliasson is re-staging his enchanting optical-architectural installation Beauty — presented at the MoMA in 2008 — a 360° arena-like space with shifting light made to resemble the spectacular illuminations of the Aurora Borealis.

Another must-visit installation can be found on the island of Shodoshima, which will feature a recent work by Korean-American artist Do-Ho Suh, whose gossamer architectural installations at New York’s Lehman Maupin gallery have received critical acclaim. Titled Net-Work, the piece roughly takes the shape of a net, a cobweb of semi-opaque jointed human figures, which are connected by threads running inside their legs and arms. The work seems to allude to the way in which joining together, as the Seven Islands will do for this festival, can reinforce and enhance individual strength.

At Chinese Classical Art Auctions, One Belgian Couple Has a Magic Touch

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By Louise Chen

Originally published on artinfo.com, July 06, 2010

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/35017/at-chinese-classical-art-auctions-one-belgian-couple-has-a-magic-touch/

This spring, the Asian market for ancient Chinese artworks, which languished during the worldwide recession, rebounded dramatically, with numerous lots setting new records. However, amid all of that action, one set of lots, sold from the Guy & Myriam Ullens Collection at Beijing Poly International Auction Co., Ltd. last month, stood out. All 12 lots on offer from that collection — an assortment of works by ancient and modern Chinese artists, including seven antiquities that were exhibited at Beijing's Palace Museum in 2002 — sold, fetching RMB 146.2 million ($21.4 million).

The success of the auction was not entirely unexpected, considering that the Ullenses — a Belgian couple who started collecting rare ancient Chinese artworks in the 1980s and founded the nonprofit Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in 2007 in Beijing — are among the most prominent collectors of Chinese art worldwide. Last year, in Poly's fall sale, the Ullens' two lots — Ming court painter Wu Bin's 1615 Portraits of Eighteen Arhats (which the couple purchased in 1992 for only $620,000) and Letter Leaf by scholar Zeng Gong, who is considered one of eight greats of the Tang and Song dynasties — were respectively sold for RMB 16.9 million ($24.7 million) and RMB 10.8 million ($15.8 million), breaking records in ancient Chinese painting and calligraphy.

While questions about the Wu Bin work's attribution were raised by some Chinese art collectors before the painting headed to China, it was later authenticated by Poly auction specialists based on an inscription in the distinctive handwriting of Qing dynasty Emperor Qianlong, who was known for his connoisseurship.

Ambitious collectors and the newly-moneyed class in China are awaiting the next surprise from the Ullenses, who own an unknown amount of rare classical works.

A Survey of Steven Holl's Architecture Comes to an Italian Castle

By Louise Chen

Originally published on artinfo.com, August 05, 2010

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/architecture-design/article/35149-a-survey-of-steven-holls-architecture-comes-to-an-italian-castle

Steven Holl, the award-winning architect behind such acclaimed buildings as the 2007 "lens" expansion to Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, is having a welcome turn in the spotlight thanks to a survey of his recent European and Chinese projects at the 16th-century castle of Acaya in Lecce, Italy. Titled “Su Pietra,” the exhibition — running from July 10 through January 15 — is an ambitious detailing of Holl's design process, with displays ranging from drawings and building models to 3-D animations, with images of his postmodern structures cast onto the castle's ancient stone walls via high-definition projections.

An architect whose sensitive designs often play with feints of lighting and minimalist touches to all but disappear into their surroundings, Holl is something of a futurist naturalist — an approach that can be clearly seen in his European projects. In Hamarøy, Norway, for instance, the architect's 2009 Knut Hamsun Center — a monument to the country's controversial Nobel Prize-winning author and Nazi sympathizer — is a block of black wood topped by reedy plant life, resembling an angular chunk of obsidian growing out of the landscape. The Herning Museum of

Contemporary Art in Denmark, on the other hand, is an ethereal complex of broad white surfaces that sits, almost hovering like a low cloud, in the midst of a field. 

The Chinese part of the exhibition, meanwhile, revolves around the themes of urbanization, multi-functionality, and sustainability. After launching his Beijing office in 2006, the architect and his partners Li Hu and Chris McVoy have built up one of the most sought-after international firms for new landmark projects in a major Chinese city, creating structures known for their shifting views, malleable spatial arrangements, and dynamic use of water and air to create micro-climate outdoor public areas.

The best-known of these was Holl's first project in China's capital city, the 722,000-square-feet Linked Hybrid complex, which consists of eight towers linked by a ring of sky bridges. It was chosen as the “Best Tall Building” of 2009 by the Chinese Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats. Then, in Shenzhen, the Vanke Center — dubbed “the horizontal skyscraper” — stretches for 200,000-square-feet, a span as long as the height of the Empire State Building, offering a 360-degree view of the surrounding tropical landscape.

The Skin of the World: An Exhibition of Li Tianyuan's Photography

By Louise Chen

Originally published on artinfo.com, June 18, 2010

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/277255/the-skin-of-the-world-an-exhibition-of-li-tianyuans

Although he established himself as a painter, Li Tianyuan recently has been garnering more attention for his photographic works. The Skin of the World, curated by Wang Jiang, includes Li’s most recent large format (8 x 10 film) color photographs, on view at 4-Face Space Gallery June 12–27 in Beijing's 798 art district.

At first glance, Li seems to take a traditional approach to this series of portraits, capturing moments and subjects with subtle lights and shadows evocative of Rembrandts paintings. The juxtaposition of two half-body shots in contrasting tones within a single image adds a sense of depth to the all-black background. “Rather than a conversation, the portraits present the confrontation between the two selves, one as subject and the other object,” commented art critic Gu Zheng at the opening.

The portraits' subjects range from renowned artists and designers to the average student. Each subject embodies his or her distinct social role; each resides in a specific geographic space — so after locating each subject on Google Earth, Li lines the bottom of each photo with the corresponding camouflage-like image cropped from the original panoramic shot. By repeatedly employing the same composition, the artist presents a variety of faces that embody the diversity of the world, raising the question of how we detect the heterogeneity beneath a quasi-homogeneous surface.

Art Dubai Names Antonia Carver as Director

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By Louise Chen

Originally published on artinfo.com, July 30, 2010

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/34911/art-dubai-names-antonia-carver-as-director/

Leading Middle Eastern art fair Art Dubai has appointed Antonia Carver, a journalist and curator who has most recently led Bidoun Projects, as its new director. Prior to the appointment, she worked as editor-at-large for Bidoun magazine (the publishing side of the Middle Eastern cultural outlet) and the Art Newspaper (which first reported her appointment), as well as the Dubai International Film Festival, where she served on the board.

The Dubai Art Fair is partly owned by the Dubai International Finance Center, a conglomerate of financial companies that is a major patron of the arts in the Middle East. Last year, Abaraaj Capital, an equity company that is part of the DIFC, presented the first annual Abraaj Capital Art Prize at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, awarding three emerging artists — from Iran, Algeria, and Turkey — with $200,000 and showing their works at the museum and the Dubai Art Fair.

Officials from the fair say that they plan to work closely with the Sharjah Biennale to raise the international awareness of artists from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as they expand into those regions. Recently there has been a surge in contemporary art in the Middle East, as wealthy locals have flocked to international and regional art fairs, snapping up works along the way.