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LAST month, under the smog-haze skies of the most rapidly expanding capital in the world, a small wooden crate containing a dead magpie, sundry sharp objects and a rather dodgy-looking video sailed through international customs to land on the doorstep of the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. Franked with the words 'Glasgow School of Art', the box's contents formed the first major exhibition of Scottish art in the Chinese capital, symbolically sealing a unique international partnership.
Next year, alongside a continuing series of Sino-Scottish exhibitions, 70 Chinese students will move to Glasgow to study for an MA in design. China may have 5,000 years of unbroken civilisation - despite the best efforts of the Cultural Revolution - but Scotland has designs on its future. It has been a long process, admits Sam Ainsley, head of Glasgow's fine art course, standing in the lofty foyer of the Central Academy's gallery, trying to convey via sign language the word 'projector' to a bemused assistant. Censorship had been a niggling worry, but now that she's on location, Ainsley's most pressing problem is trying to work out how to arrange two floors' worth of exhibits into an unexpected three-storey exhibition space. But as you frequently find in China, nothing is impossible. This is the country that is about to complete the final stage of a railway across the semi-frozen Tibetan plateau, which foreign experts said couldn't be built. This is the country that is building the world's most controversial dam, the Three Gorges on the Yangtze river, displacing nearly two million people in the process. This is the country that built the Great Wall, which it still insists is the only man-made structure visible from space. It is no surprise then that this is also the country that is succeeding in acquiring the quick-fix trappings of a First World economy without first developing the infrastructure to furnish it. Ignore the thousands of new buildings being thrown up overnight, and this drive to emulate (and better) the trophy assets of thriving western cultures is evident in one single fact: embedded in the heart of the Forbidden City is a Starbucks, packed with Chinese tourists. Beijing is no longer a city of Mao suits and industrialisation, it's a city of laughing Chinese tour groups recording every moment on the latest digital cameras. Two million cars overheat daily in smog-choked traffic jams on the ever-increasing suite of 12-lane ringroads. In an unprecedented programme of demolition and development ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games, the city's famous historic neighbourhoods, the hutongs, are being bulldozed by teams of workers from out of town, prowling the streets for buildings daubed with the ominous white Chai symbol. In a city where there is little graffiti, Chai (which means 'destruction') is the visual symbol of a new era. Whether the result is worth all this demolition is a moot point in modern-day Beijing. Amid a sea of gleaming glass shopping malls and luxury hotels, you will occasionally find the ultimate in kitsch - a gaudy new 'fake' hutong, where Chinese tourists snack on skewers of fried scorpion and browse through tacky souvenirs. "More people in Beijing are fighting now for the protection of the old districts," explains Cathy, our student guide, as we bike through the hutongs by Beijing's Houhai lake. "People know the past is precious, but if we just focus on the past we will lose the future. Rich people want to protect these places, but the poor people who live in them would often rather have a modern apartment where they don't have to go to a shared bathroom in the street outside. There is a balance to be struck between commercial profit and culture." Her words carry the weight of history, even if the scale is unprecedented. When Mao entered Beijing through its centuries-old city gates in 1949, he also signed the order to demolish them. Forty years later, those same walls are being partially rebuilt in recognition of the tourist dollar: people pay to see history. Everything is being made new, but while Beijing is confident in polishing up its relics, it is less confident in creating its own 21st-century icons - and that is why China is increasingly keen to send its students abroad. "We had no idea what to expect," says Ainsley, back at the academy's gallery, staring rather philosophically at the unexpected extra wall space. "But this seems to be how it works here. You can't arrange meetings, it's always, 'Phone me closer to the time.' As a result, you've got no idea what you're coming into." It is frustrating, she admits, but then they aren't the only ones in uncharted waters. A video installation of a woman naked from the waist down caused a flurry of phone calls to the academy's HQ, resolved when it was decided the nudity wasn't sexual. Beijing may be opening up to the western art world, but it is still in the process of learning how to be an artistic player. "We are playing catch-up," admits Xu Jia, the passionate, bespectacled international officer at the academy, who has been drafted in to help set up the Glasgow exhibition. Having worked in London for a few years - "a city whose art scene is developed almost to the end of the process" - she is all too aware of China's need to learn. "We are just at the start of the whole process, and developing very fast. There are many possibilities and a great pressure on everyone. In the Chinese environment, you might be a famous artist, a domestic and international seller, but because the domestic market is not developed, there is no certainty in the future of contemporary art. There is a reluctance to commit to something that might not repay investment, but there is also a curiosity about art." Beijing, as the seat of government in a one-party state, has always been the most conservative of China's major cities, but with the world's tourists and journalists due to descend on the capital in 2008 for the opening of the Olympics, Beijing needs a cultural identity. And for this, surprisingly, it has looked almost exclusively beyond its own shores. The remit? It has got to be big. Flying down through two layers of acrid brown smog into Beijing airport, the first thing you glimpse, if the dust from the building works and the rapidly encroaching Gobi desert allows, are the infinite porcupine spikes of the scaffolding hiding the airport's embryonic third terminal - a vast futuristic structure designed by Sir Norman Foster. It will be the world's largest, most technologically advanced airport terminal. But not everyone is happy. "There has been too little discussion on the look of the city, too late," says one major Chinese architect, now based in Australia. "China's architects in the last decade have been copying buildings that clients see abroad. We have lost our sense of what is Chinese. The pace of change is so fast that foreign architects are doing all the interesting projects. Pierre de Meuron and Jacques Herzog, who designed London's Tate Modern, have designed our Olympic stadium. Where are the Chinese architects? We are in danger of losing everything that is unique about Beijing." It is not only the unique architecture, but Beijing's unique way of life that is being lost. The tanks may be gone from Tiananmen Square, but the once open space is now enclosed, as are vast swathes of the city, in 5ft-high white railings. Locals and visitors alike are herded to specific crossing points, which are few and far between. The ever-dwindling number of cyclists find themselves channelled along one-way routes. Railings may not seem a hostile intrusion from afar, but at street level they are an invidious form of control and oppression. Back at the Central Academy, the path of international understanding is paved with well-meant misunderstandings. Clustered around a trestle table sit five smiling gallery assistants - all middle-aged women - hands folded in their laps, awaiting orders from Anthony Schrag, the Glasgow performance artist in charge of installing the exhibition. Organised in a strict hierarchy, none of them speaks English and Schrag has no Chinese. Putting up a picture is a slow process involving at least four people, each with specific tasks. With less than two days to the launch, Schrag is worried. Xu Jia suggests I tour the second Beijing Biennale, inaugurated to put the city on a par with the culturally vibrant Shanghai. It proves, with its mediocre exhibits and box-ticking approach to contemporary art, that constructing an art scene is more problematic than constructing the world's largest dam. But if its contents are sneered at by Chinese artists, no one can deny that the biennale has succeeded, indirectly, in fostering a thriving unofficial fringe. Beijing may yet pull off the feat of creating an artistic bite to match its bark. Out on the fringe, the best-known hub is 798, part of the former Dashanzi factory district that is now Beijing's centre for contemporary art. The walls of this cluster of Bauhaus-style ex-military factory buildings are emblazoned with red propaganda slogans urging the former factory workers on to greater feats of production. Outside may be quiet tree-lined streets, but the interiors are earthen-floored and littered with industrial ducts and pipes. At one end of the hall Belgian artist Wim Delvoye has installed a herd of pigs tattooed with consumer logos, attracting a laughing crowd, as assistants in overalls continuously shovel manure - a rather apt comment on waste and consumer culture. At the other, a neon sign, by sculptor Sui Jianguo, announces boldly: "Made in China". There are references to the Cultural Revolution, but there is also a strong theme of the loss of community. At 798 itself, New York-based curator Wu Hung chats to the effusive Colin Chinnery, arts manager for the British Council in Beijing and, coincidentally, another Scot pioneering artistic relations with the Chinese. The exhibition being launched, Waste Not, contains the carefully audited contents of the house of the mother of artist Song Dong. It represents, quite strikingly, a Chinese mentality that is, like the city's hutongs, fast disappearing. Needless to say, 798 was itself, not long ago, scheduled for demolition, but the interested eye of international collectors and observers saved it. One should always beware politicians bearing gifts, however. With the blessing of the government, Dashanzi has become the commercialised centre of Beijing's artistic community, a rather self-congratulatory back-slap of a select few Chinese artists, wealthy foreign collectors and beautiful people. These, says one artist, who doesn't wish to be named, are China's art elite. "They are superstars, not artists," he says, dismissively. "How can you expect anyone to practise their art when there's an international collector knocking on your door every five minutes?" The idea, of course, would not bother most art students, be they Chinese or Glasgow's own. But in the face of a rapidly commercialising art scene, integrity is the one choice a gallery can make, something of which Sun Ning, the proactive 798 events director, is well aware. The problem in China, agrees the academy's Xu Jia, is that there is a very ambiguous attitude towards artists, particularly among students, one that she hopes the Glasgow exchange will start to change. "In China, sadly, the sort of art that is popular is the kind of art that will sell," she says. "And that is traditional art. "Students used to be very idealistic - they were heroes - but now they are realistic. Only a few art graduates will survive as artists, but the public image, from the mass media, is of hugely successful artists living like kings. The reality is not generally like 798." Of course, like any city, Beijing has galleries, such as the well-regarded Courtyard abutting the moat of the Forbidden City, stuffed with the current vogue for 'big head' (quite literally) portraiture. They survive on a cutting-edge curatorial policy, but their market is generally international. Many people believe that the key to creating a domestic market is in balancing the commercial with the artistic. "The most exciting art districts are now even further north, at Song Zhuang, but the artists are poor. As soon as a place becomes known, the rates go up and the artists move out. The choice is art or commercialisation. To survive at the moment, you must feed the international market, because there is no domestic market," says Xu Jia. Jan Murray, a tourist and art lover of Scots descent from Illinois, who I find wandering around the China Hall of the Beijing Biennale, is all too familiar with the kind of art that American buyers want from China. "In the US, it's the landscapes that sell, those amazing ink washes. Very traditional stuff," she says, standing in front of a rather exuberant oil tableaux of a group of painters and decorators. "You would never have found a painting like this in an official exhibition ten years ago." Then she points out a photo-realistic portrait of a noble-looking peasant woman carrying a woven basket. "This is what you saw ten years ago: worthy peasants and vast ink waterfalls, real communist imagery. But this other stuff is some change," she says. "They're really getting moving now." Back at the launch party for the Glasgow art school exhibition, three busloads of the academy's students have now turned up - far more than expected. They crowd hungrily on to the first-floor landing to watch Anthony Schrag perform a gravity-defying 360-degree circle on the safety shutter, part of his investigation into different ways of using the body. "It is very different to what we do here," says 18-year-old Aida, thoughtfully. "This exhibition shows me that there are many different ways to express feelings, many different media, whereas in China students choose maybe one or two." She drags me to Bryndis Erla Hjalmarsdottir's dead magpie. "This is very interesting," she says, awestruck. "I find it very special. It has opened my mind and my eyes." Around us, trendy-looking students snap away with digital cameras, documenting the work. They are impressed. Some of them, like Aida, will be at Glasgow next year, "if we pass the English test". But every one of them, when asked if this is the kind of work they might produce, shake their heads and say that they like traditional art - painting and drawing. Robert Hiscox, whose company funded Glasgow's Beijing exhibition, would probably approve. He jokes that he doesn't understand some of the things coming out of art school. "But if I don't like it, that's not the point," he says. "I think it's my job to support young artists to develop and get that foot on the ladder. And if it encourages more connection between artistic cultures, so much the better." As the students leave for a celebratory meal, I ask Aida why she wants to be an architect - a canny choice given the current industry boom. Her reply is poetically Chinese. "I want to be an architect because you only have one life. If you make a building it lives for many lives." It is, of course, rather ironic, given the current destruction of 800-year-old buildings in the middle of Beijing. But in five years' time, according to my anonymous architect friend, the other major cities in China will be undergoing the same rapid and massive development as the capital. Aida wants to create the new China, and she's going to do it from Glasgow. Source: news.scotsman.com Nov 5, 05 |
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