butchwax

Today, Yamin and I went to Cao Chang Di, the newer village of galleries just to the north of the 798 Art Factory, to see an exhibit of Ai Weiwei’s “New York Photographs 1983-1993” at Three Shadows Photography Art Center.

Over the last few months, we’ve taken several trips to various places in Beijing, usually the 798 or Cao Chang Di areas, to visit galleries, usually with no plan but to just hop among them and see if there’s anything we particularly like. Yamin’s reasons are related to her new career as an artist, and my own reasons are that I want to learn art history, to be able to have a conversation about art, and to nurture some uneducated art ideas of my own.

Ai Weiwei, an article in the Beijing 798 book said, is one of the most influential members of the Beijing contemporary art scene. He was one of the first to move near the 798 factory area, and, the author said, he was the only one who had any taste.

It’s unclear to me what the author meant by that. Allegedly, Ai Weiwei had built a poured concrete house that was sparingly furnished with mostly Chinese antiques. He may also have been one of the scene that had the most exposure to Western contemporary art, since he spent 12 years abroad, mostly in New York, in the ’80s and ’90s.

Whatever the case, he certainly has credentials, as his photos show. Perhaps half of the photos are of famous people, such as Alan Ginsberg (who showed up in his apartment many times), Chen Kaige (the internationally famous Chinese director); protests (like a New York AIDS protest) and riots (like the 1988 Tompkins Square Park Riot); politicians (like Bill Clinton campaigning in New York) and others. I was quite struck by how he’d managed to be so involved in society in New York, since he was a foreigner.

In China, many of the more experienced artists complain that much of Chinese contemporary art is made to satisfy foreign demand. Many Chinese artists use internationally-recognizable Chinese symbols in their art, such as images of Mao, the Forbidden City (the artist Tian Ye), or Cultural Revolution propaganda (Wang Guangyi). This is sometimes interpreted as being “Chinese kitsch”, like the Mao shoulder bags, Lei Feng posters and other cheap Communist-themed crap (all of which I love very much) sold mostly to foreigners at the tourist markets. Ai Weiwei, in an article that Yamin translated bits of for me, said that contemporary art doesn’t even have any meaning to the average Chinese today. Yamin pointed out that when Chinese have art in their homes, it’s often traditional Chinese art, such as painting or calligraphy. So contemporary art made in China is mostly aimed at a market composed of foreigners and affluent Chinese.

Ai Weiwei’s statement cut through the crap for me, and for this I liked him. Today, after we saw the photos, we went outside the gallery where the attendees were hanging around fires chatting, and Ai Weiwei was there circulating around talking to people. I decided to ask him how as a foreigner in the US, he’d managed to meet all those people and be part of all those events. I think I was hoping to get a little bit of wisdom out of him for myself, since I really don’t have any friends in Beijing outside our office, and happening on an event like this is a pretty big deal for me. Yeah, I’m spending all my time building a start-up, but that means a little advice would be even more valuable, since I don’t have so much time to devote.

I thought about how to ask the question in Chinese, waited for the right time, and walked up to Ai Weiwei and asked. How did he manage, as a foreigner, to be so much in the middle of things? He told me, he didn’t try, it just happened. “Shit happens,” he said, in English. Yamin tried to help clarify what I was trying to get at, but he interrupted, saying, “我完全听懂了他的意思”, “I completely understood his question”. Crap. No wisdom there. I told him I loved the exhibition, and thanked him, and walked away. He seemed a little surprised that I walked away so quickly, so perhaps I could’ve pumped him a little harder, but I felt like his answer had kind of cut me off. In effect, he was saying that he hadn’t needed to try at all, and that somehow, magically, wherever he went, he’d ended up in the middle of riots or had Alan Ginsberg knocking on his apartment door, uninvited. Maybe that’s part of the artist’s mystique, to keep people guessing. But I’d hoped he’d try to be a bridge between Western and Chinese cultures, and to share some of his experience.

Ai Weiwei and John

For now, I’ll just keep reading about art on the Internet, going to galleries with Yamin, and maybe, down the road I’ll have a big breakthrough. Anyway, it’s certainly a lot of fun to think about art. It’s a whole new world.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 2nd, 2009 at 9:23 pm and is filed under art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.