China Daily Global Edition (USA)
JINGART ADDS NEW DIMENSIONS The inaugural fair showcasing high-end works from local and international galleries proves an instant hit with the capital’s art lovers. Lin Qi Reports.
Faced with a local audience who is used to large expositions held at expansive venues, the inaugural Jingart art fair instead offered up a small and delicate art fair, in the hope that its diverse style and international vision would help enrich the capital’s art scene and cultivate the next generation of collectors.
The high-end fair, which ran from Thursday to Sunday, took place at Beijing Quanyechang, a three-story former department store constructed in the early 1900s in the capital’s historic Qianmen commercial area.
The baroque building is infused with the ornamental art nouveau touches, the architectural movement that flourished in Europe at the turn of the 20th century. Opening in 1905, the building operated as a department store until the mid-1970s, and is now a protected historical and cultural site.
The first edition of Jingart Beijing 2018 presents a similar classic, crossover style. Some 30 galleries and institutions showed a wide range of works — from fine art and furniture to works of design — at partially opened sections of the building, sparsely arranged over three floors.
It didn’t quite feel like a typical contemporary art fair where booths extend as far as the eye can see, occupying a big space. It was more like a salon, and it reminded some visitors of a similar feeling to the first edition of the annual Shanghai fair Art021 in 2013.
While Bao Yifeng was one of the three co-founders of Art021 and also helped set up Jingart, he says it was never the intention to set up a Beijing edition of the Shanghai fair. Instead, Bao says, Jingart was envisaged as a completely different brand tailored specifically to the cultural interests of art buyers in Beijing and its neighboring regions.
Organizing similar art shows in a variety of locations is common occurrence for Untitled II international fairs such as Art Basel (which takes place in Basel, Hong Kong and Miami) and Frieze (in London and New York). Bao says, however, that this business model does not fit with a local exhibition like Art021 which is primarily rooted in the tastes of local Chinese art lovers. They tend to differ from place to place.
He says that while visitors to the Shanghai fair showed a collective preference for modern and contemporary art which is the primary focus of Art021, leading buyers in Beijing tended to favor “traditional, classic” works, while the young generation of buyers were inclined to seek contemporary and international products.
The inaugural lineup of Jingart was set up to address that mixed demand, and future shows will continue to do so, say the organizers.
There were top international galleries such as Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner, both of which have gallery spaces in Hong Kong and were making their Beijing debuts at Jingart. Leading local galleries also participated, including the Shixiang Gallery and Shanghart Gallery. Both Hauser & Wirth and the Shixiang Gallery worked with the Wu Dayu Foundation to show paintings by Wu, a 20th-century pioneer of modern Chinese art.
Also on show were many antique works of art, furniture and jewelry by contemporary designers. Many galleries sold works on display.
“Whether it was for trade, artistic exchanges or just out of interest, there were many reasons people are willing to invest the time and money to visit an art exposition,” says prominent Beijing gallery owner Cheng Xindong.
Bao says the participants were selected to meet the varied interests of visitors and provided the featured galleries with a great opportunity to “share their client resources”.
Competition for new collectors has grown dramatically as emerging art hubs like Chengdu, Wuhan and Shenzhen continue to boom. While established art fairs in major cities like Art Beijing, which has been running for more than a decade, continue to appeal to middle-class buyers who are willing to spend tens of thousands of yuan on a work, Jingart appears to be targeting the higher echelons of buyers: those who come from affluent background.
Bao says that while young collectors who attend their fairs come from many different backgrounds, some are from a family of antiques collectors, while others may have accumulated wealth in the finance or internet industries. They seem to be united by the fact that they are willing and able to spend hundreds of thousands of yuan, or even more, on artworks.
Shanghai gallery owner Hua Yuzhou, who attended Jingart, says the quality of the inaugural fair was a refreshing addition to the capital’s scene. Internal Medicine the current trend of combining different styles and media, which firmly transcends the usual categorizations of contemporary art.”
The trend is exemplified in the work of the only Chineseborn artist at the exhibition and 2002 Marcel Duchamp Prize nominee, Wang Du, whose pieces are hybrids of architecture, performance art and improv. With his symbolic giant sculptures and installations, he often criticizes today’s media landscape and consumerist society. Three of his works — Internal Surgery and
Bridging the Gap and are taken from his 2016 solo exhibition, The Clinic of the World, which seeks to diagnose the ills of society.
Contemporary art takes up a substantial part of this year’s Festival Croisements, which will host 68 events, ranging from art, drama, music to film, in 30 Chinese cities.
2018 marks the 13th year of the festival, which has evolved into the biggest foreign cultural festival in China and the biggest French cultural festival outside of France.
Since its establishment in 2005, more than 19 million people have participated in the festival, which, according to Robert Lacombe, director of the French Institute of China, maintains its original aim to encourage and develop encounters between the artists and cultural institutions of the two countries.
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