How this NGO cut out a global path for young Chinese artists
PIGEONS will speak, and American actors will struggle with Mandarin in two of the 15 short videos that Cheng Ran, a Chinese artist, is making for his US debut at the New Museum, opening October 26.
This 35-year-old, born in Inner Mongolia, is on his first trip to New York for a residency sponsored by the K11 Art Foundation, a Hong Kong nonprofit that is building a bridge between Chinese artists and international museums.
Since he arrived in August, he has been busy shooting, scouring the city – from a boat graveyard in Staten Island to obscure music venues in Bushwick – to see if it matches depictions in Taxi Driver and other Hollywood films.
It is the first time the museum has offered this opportunity to a mainland Chinese artist since the 1990s. Cheng Ran’s residency is proof of the influence of the K11 Art Foundation and the inroads it is making in the New York art scene.
The foundation is the creation of Hong Kong entrepreneur Adrian Cheng, 36, executive vice chairman of the New World Development real estate and retail empire founded by his grandfather. Having spent 10 years in the US in boarding school and at Harvard, Adrian Cheng started the foundation at age 31 and identifies closely with the group of millennial artists his foundation supports.
“There’s no argument that people are quite interested in emerging Chinese artists, but InCourseoftheMiraculous a lot of curators do not have the access,” he said.
He has the unbridled enthusiasm of a well-bred salesman, throwing around terms such as “incubation” and “globalism” in ways that can sound like a pitch – but one that it seems many museum directors have bought into.
“The reason so many curators listen to us is because we are not a gallery, we are not dealers, and we do not represent artists – our list is more academic,” he said.
He also views the foundation’s work as a counterbalance to the overheated Chinese art market. “If you look at China in the past few years, a lot of conceptual artists are emerging whose work does not work in any auction market,” he said. “I am not saying that the auctions are bad. I am just saying that the art scene needs to be more diversified.”
Adrian Cheng was already a collector of “global contemporary art”. He showed his international flair in 2008 when he started K11 Art Malls in Hong Kong and Shanghai. These art-and-commerce shopping centres have exhibition spaces and public works from the likes of Damien Hirst and Olafur Eliasson.
Since the establishment of the foundation, it has formed partnerships with Palais de Tokyo and the Pompidou Center in Paris, as well as the Serpentine Galleries and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
In 2013, it sponsored the Ink Art exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This year, Adrian Cheng cemented his influence by joining the board of the Public Art Fund.
The foundation has a network of local curators to help find artists worthy of support. It provided the New Museum with 50 artists; 15 were interviewed before the New Museum selected Cheng Ran.
Massimiliano Gioni, artistic director of the New Museum, who served as director of the 2010 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, said the foundation had furthered the museum’s own research into Asian art and the relationship was collaborative, not just financial.
Though neither he nor Adrian Cheng would say what the gift entailed, Gioni insisted that the amount did not factor into their decision to work with the foundation and that it was entirely separate from the $43 million the museum had raised towards its $80 million capital campaign.
Certainly, the lift that the foundation has given Cheng Ran’s career over the past four years demonstrates just how helpful it can be. Since Adrian Cheng first met the artist at the Leo Xu Projects gallery in Shanghai in 2012, the foundation has included his work in two exhibitions, finally producing his nine-hour masterpiece, In Course of the Miraculous, in 2015.
The film, almost impossible to watch in its entirety, is packed with stunning images while telling three real-life stories about people who disappeared mysteriously: the British explorer George Mallory, who went missing on Mount Everest in 1924; the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, who vanished during his 1975 journey across the Atlantic; and the 2011 mutiny on the Chinese fishing trawler Lu Rong Yu 2682 that left only a third of its crew alive.
“I haven’t seen a work with images of such strangeness and purity come out of an artist of his age in quite a while,” Gioni said. Cheng Ran’s coming exhibition at the New Museum – titled Diary of a Madman – will be akin to an open studio, with 11 monitors playing at once while an ambient soundtrack provided by the noise band While We Still Have Bodies fills the gallery.
“As the art world has become more and more global and complex, we need to rely more on the expertise of people who are on the [ground],” Gioni said. “This doesn’t mean I am simply drinking the Kool-Aid or I give up my critical distance, but I feel this is more honest than the colonialist presumed superiority of a curator that goes to China to ‘discover’ the scene.”