The art sensation of modern China
I like art. Our house has lots of tiny collection of naïf art from Haiti and Nicaragua, and we have contemporary art from Peru and Colombia in a storage garage in Delaware.
But we can’t afford contemporary Chinese art. It’s gone through the roof. To wit: The work above from artist Yue Minjun sold last week at auction in London for $5.9 million, smashing the previous record, also held by Yue.
The painting, titled Execution, was inspired by the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in and near Tiananmen Square in 1989. For a decade, Yue declined to exhibit it in public.
The figures in Yue’s paintings all laugh uproariously. One of his works, apparently a self-portrait, shows him dressed as the Pope, guffawing wildly. Another one shows men giddy with laughter with flying geese in the background.
Yue explained to Xinhua news agency last month why he depicts people laughing.
“The great social changes have caused psychological reactions in individuals -- not only happiness, but also fear of the unknown future. The wild laugh maybe is a try to cover the fear,” Yue said.
Viewers draw different impressions from his work: some read pain behind the laughter and some see insanity. "I always believe different people should have different views of any work. As long as the work attracts them, makes them think, or just interests them. That's enough," he says.
Yue has reason to be laughing. The artist is taking home huge paychecks. According to this blog, another of Yue’s paintings sold at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong for $4.1 million last week.
When I wrote a story about Beijing’s 798 art district earlier this year, several gallery owners and artists told me quietly that prices had gone beyond their wildest imagination, even beyond reason. Many not-so-great artists are doing well, opening restaurants and bars on the side from their art earnings.
I can attest that art we considered when we first got here in 2003 has even more than quadrupled in value since then. Is it a bubble? Or is it just reaching its true value?
By the way, the Chinese media was nearly silent on Yue’s record-smashing sale, for obvious reasons given the political content.
On the subject of true value and escalating prices, it seems plausible that the works that capture the zeitgiest and hold the essence of China's transfrmational context in their composition are surely due similar price tags as the best of Warhol and his ilk whose works serve to be less potent symbolically of change than even the most indifferent observer of China's tumultuous shifts could ever remark.. accordingly 5.9m for a painting housing all the seminal themes of such a rising dragon, hosting the sentiment of 1 in 5 of the worlds popoulation may in some future respects be come to be seen as quite a bargain.
Posted by: Trevor Simon | October 15, 2007 at 08:42 PM