Talking Art |
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Why Collectors Are Crazy For Chinese ArtIt’s not only dynastic porcelain vases. Art mavens are buying contemporary works as well. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when Jim Eccles was working as an IBM systems engineer, he fell in love with the work of the late Chinese artist Chao Chung Hsiang, who was then living in New York. Now 69 and retired, Eccles still loves the seven colorful paintings, some abstract and others in a more traditional Chinese style, that he bought for $200 to $500 each. But lately he has thought about selling them. Based on recent auction sales, he figures they can fetch $50,000 to $100,000 each. With the emergence of free-spending, nouveau riche collectors from mainland China, the Chinese art market is at the start of what may be an extended boom. Buyers are snatching up everything from 3,000- year-old bronze vessels to avant-garde paintings by Chinese-born artists living in China and abroad. Ever since more than 50 Asian bidders, many from China, showed up at a seminal September, 2003, sale of Chinese rarities at the Doyle auction house in New York, prices have been surpassing estimates. Some examples: At this fall’s Hong Kong sales, a 1947 ink scroll by the painter Fu Baoshi, who died in 1965, sold for $1.1 million, four times as much as Sotheby’s (BID) predicted. On Nov 17, London dealer Giuseppe Eskenazi, who often buys for European and American collectors, paid a record $5.7 million for an 18-inch early Ming Dynasty dish at a Bonhams & Butterfields auction in San Francisco. Art collecting was one of the “bourgeois” activities purged in the 1960s and 70s during the Cultural Revolution, but it has flourished under recent economic reforms. Dozens of art auction houses have sprung up in China in recent years, the most prominent of which is China Guardian in Beijing. Experts expect prices to continue rising as China’s wealth grows. The Chinese don’t understand why there’s such a big price difference between Western art and the greatest Chinese art, says Henry Howard-Sneyd, Sotheby’s Hong Kong-based managing director for China and Southeast Asia. For instance, while a Picasso painting sold this spring for $104 million, works by Zhang Daqian, who lived from 1899 to 1983 and is known as “China’s Picasso,” usually top out at about $1 million. Chinese collectors figure Zhang’s paintings should eventually approach Picasso’s level. Is it too late for smaller collectors to dive in? “Oh, God, no,” says David Tang, the Hong Kong entrepreneur and art collector who argues that the rise of the Chinese art market is just beginning. Before you make any purchases, there are a few things you should know. It’s important to buy through reputable dealers. Fakes and copies are rife, particularly of classic paintings and furniture, and even experts can be fooled. You can also find bargains in China’s far out contemporary art. Prices for the best known artists, such as 39-year-old Zhang Huan, have soared to $40,000 and up. But many promising artists remain affordable. A top pick of Kent Logan, a retired securities executive in Vail, Colo., who owns 120 contemporary Chinese works, is 30 year old Zhao Bo of Chongqing, in south central China’s Sichuan province. His jazzy street scenes sell for $700 to $9,000 or so. If this art appeals to you, start thumbing through catalogs, visiting galleries and studying websites of galleries and important shows. If you see something you like, don’t dally. As Jim Eccles discovered, prices are rising as we speak. Extracts from Thane Peterson, BusinessWeek
The Traceries of Time: The Paintings of Raymond Yap The figurative daubs and smears of pigment, found deep within the caves of Lascaux in Southern France, that represent the animals around which the lives of those early artists revolved, are vivid traces of physical evidence that man has been striving to pictorially represent his environment and its events – to rescue them from the relentless tides of time - for more than thirty thousand years. As a process painter, Raymond Yap allows time and entropy to have their way with the surfaces of his paintings. After applying the initial layer of paint he abandons it to the element of chance as the drying process causes the surface to shrink and craze into an intricately patterned network of lines - the traceries of time - that maps out the unpredictable play of serendipity. The asymmetrical but even spread of this patterning displays all the hallmarks of labour-intensive deliberation on Yap’s part, but all he has done here is simply give free-reign to time and the elements. The American Art Historian James Elkins compares painting to alchemy, and writes in his seminal book, ‘What Painting Is’, “The studio is a necessary insanity… Alchemy is the best model for this plague of paint, for the self-imprisonment of the studio and for the allure of insanity”(1). This is not to suggest that Yap’s mental stability is in question but it is easy to see the parallels between what he does and the ways of the alchemists of old, waiting for the transformation of a layer of paint into a thing of beauty. Despite the resistance to beauty in the contemporary art world, there is no denying that the surfaces that Yap creates on his paintings possess a beauty all of their own. Each of his paintings is a unique event, each one a singular expression of the aleatory meanderings of chance, which at the same time creates an armature for the final form of the painting, offering a foundation for the subsequent layers that Yap adds to the painting before its completion. Just as Ariadne’s thread, laid down through its maze of tunnels, provided an escape from Labyrinth, so the reticulated surfaces of his paintings guide the painting process that brings Yap’s works to a conclusion. It is the balance between the elements of control and chance that gives these paintings their claim to uniqueness, they become the epitome of Immanuel Kant’s ding an sich, things in themselves, that sit within their own event horizons. To quote the English painter, Jason Martin:- Accidents have, historically, of course, provided many doorways into invention, and creative artists have always been open to those opportunities that accidents offer. Giving full reign to the diversions that chance brings about is acknowledging the ineffability of the moment and surrendering to the hegemony of the creative accident. Western culture no longer knows how to live in the moment, and accidents are to be avoided at all costs. By rescinding the necessity to control, Yap is releasing himself to passively observe that extended moment where sunyata reigns and denies the influence of the cultural prerogative – serendipity not only serves the Buddhist concept of sunyata but also Freud’s concept of the oceanic. These ideas run decidedly counter to all the ideals and aspirations of the capitalist consumer society and it is interesting that many of Yap’s paintings are barely veiled critiques of the modern state and its all-pervasive influences. Figuration makes an appearance in Yap’s paintings as a secondary element, superimposed upon the primary process of desiccation and reticulation, sometimes it is driven by the pre-existing patterns on the wrinkled surface which suggest shapes and forms in the same way that a seer might divine pictures and images from thrown sticks or tea-leaves in the bottom of a tea-cup, at other times, he uses templates to actually influence the final stages of the primary process. The colours, always vibrant and often used in complementary combination and juxtapositions, optically fizz and sizzle adding to the effect of unearthliness, of transcendence, that permeates these paintings, Colour is not only seductive but transcends language, as acknowledged by the American Art Critic Dave Hickey when he writes, “The condition of being ravished by colour was my principal disability as a writer, since colour for a writer is less an attribute of language than a cure for it”(3). In Yap’s paintings, we are aware of quasi-figurative shapes and forms rising and falling, as if only momentarily crystallizing before dissolving, once again, back into the cauldron of colour. The subject matter of these forms, however, anchors us firmly to reality, the passport stamp, a favourite motif of Yap’s, conveys the heavy hand of officialdom and bureaucracy. Here, Yap frees these symbolic signs from their context of angular formality, releasing them into a realm where they become aesthetic icons, where they are given a seductive quality that subverts their formerly autocratic demeanour, so they, in effect become disarmed and neutralized. These are symbols that are emotively charged swinging between the poles of repression and release - reminiscent either of those seals of approval, as part of the acceptable rituals that mark arrival and departure from exotic holidays, which act as bookends to times of freedom and pleasure, or of big brother oppressively monitoring cross-border movements poised to pounce on the slightest contravention of extensive and often obscure laws, fear of which is always present. The paintings of Raymond Yap can be perceived from several standpoints. They can be seen purely as semi-abstract process paintings whose vibrant swarms of colour are undoubtedly visually compelling. They can be seen, through their symbolism as a critique of political oppression and all its connotations, and they can also be seen as expressions of those painterly transitions from figuration to abstraction that he continually visits, where that threshold between form and flux arcs in sinuous traceries across the picture plane. For three or fours years Yap has been exploring the questions that this series of images raises, the challenges that it poses, each painting a resolution of previous questions and problems but each painting in turn throwing up its own questions. In giving rein to the aleatory - the whims of chance - through the processes he uses, he optimizes the opportunities for innovation and imbues his work with a feeling of freshness. Given the visual presence and power of these paintings which transcends their modest size and given their seductive and visually engaging qualities it can only hoped that Yap continues to explore and resolve the questions posed by these works for many years to come. Such a slow-burning but intense evolution takes both the artist and the viewer deeper and deeper into the painting process and given this fact it is no surprise that painting has forged a fresh credibility for itself in the pantheon of contemporary art, having been repeatedly written off, in recent years, as an irrelevant and anachronistic art form. Maybe the fluctuations in the fortunes of painting have afforded it a new toughness and vigour through which it can impose itself, and be seen as more provocative than decorative, more incisive than emollient, more vibrant than polite. 1) James Elkins, What Painting Is, Routledge, New York. Page 149. Roy Exley - art critic and writer Exhibitions: Institutional Collection: |
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