COLLECTORS’ SHOW
An annual fair will spotlight the short but significant career of the late Chinese photographer Ren Hang. Lin Qi reports.
Selected works of the late Chinese photographer Ren Hang and a rare juxtaposition of four influential Chinese private collections of photography will highlight Photofairs’ fourth edition in Shanghai this weekend. The annual fair will be held at the Shanghai Exhibition Center, catering to an ever-rising demand for contemporary photography and moving images in China and across Asia-Pacific. An inaugural Spotlight section will display 19 photos of Ren, who died in January aged 30. He was a photographer and poet who represented the best of the younger generations in contemporary Chinese art. In his short-lived career, Ren produced a body of work that explored poetic beauty and abstract features in his theme subject — nude men.
His images were last displayed at an exhibition titled Beauty without Beards at Beijing’s KWM Art Center, which opened on Jan 19. Five days later, Ren committed suicide.
Han Peipei, Photofairs’ deputy director in China, says the upcoming exhibition is to honor Ren’s talent and introduce his work to an international audience.
The Shanghai exhibition is being curated by the KWM Art Center, showing Ren’s experimental spirit that made his photos and poems insightful.
“In response to questions about his photographs, often he (Ren) would give monosyllabic answers,” says KWM’s assistant director Tim Crowley after hearing about Ren’s death. “However, when asked about his poetry, his eyes lit up and he became very alert and enthusiastic.
“He was, in a way, a poet who just happened to be a great photographer.”
A Collectors’ Exhibition will give the audience a chance to view four prominent Chinese collections that will be made public together for the first time.
The featured collectors include Adrian Cheng, the founder of K11 Art Foundation; Zhou Dawei, the founder of Shanghai’s Cc Foundation; Wang Jinyuan, chairwoman of Shanghai’s Fosun Foundation; and Shao Zhong, chairman of Modern Media Group.
The exhibition’s curator Erin Barnett says it will be a unique opportunity to see photographic and video works of some of the most compelling artists from China, Japan and Europe.
An international lineup of 50 galleries and institutions from 16 countries will also participate in this year’s fair.
Photofairs Shanghai was launched by the World Photography Organization to address a boosting market in collectable, fine-art photography.
Last year it attracted more than 27,000 visitors and posted strong sales. Works priced between $5,000 and $15,000 on average were sold in 2016.
Han says there has been a change in the trend of works sold at the fair.
She says the inaugural edition four years ago saw fashion photography in demand, while gradually, more conceptual and abstract works have been bought, “which is our main direction of creating an art fair dedicated to contemporary photography”.
The fair also shows how artists have been expanding the boundary of photography by incorporating other mediums and digital technology.
A Staged section at the upcoming fair will investigate the evolution of photography when being blended with other art forms such as performance arts and videos.
The artists working with both film and photography include Chen Qiulin from China and Pixy Liao, a Shanghaiborn artist who now resides in Brooklyn.
Han says internet-based art is also becoming more popular and the fair will present a new work by 33-year-old Chinese artist Lu Yang that was commissioned by Daata Editions, an online platform for purchasing sound, video and web-based artworks.
She says Lu has produced “groundbreaking” multimedia work related to themes
such as neuroscience, mortality and religion, and the final work will be available for downloading on Daata Editions’ website.
Han says the launch of new sections at the fair serves to bring collectors’ freshness to it and adds to the fair’s artistic depth.
“These are all curated exhibitions that will bring museum-quality exhibitions and content ranging from masterpieces to cutting-edge moving images and internet-based works. The fair’s talks program will bring together experts in the field and provide strong academic support to the themes shown.”
Photofairs also operates a fair in San Francisco, introducing Asian collectors and artists to one of the world’s most important photography centers. The next San Francisco fair will be held over Feb 23-25, 2018.
Han says the fair has become a place for new and seasoned collectors in the United States to discover leading and emerging artists from Asia, specifically China, Japan and South Korea.
“Our collectors in Shanghai are excited to venture to San Francisco — some of them for the first time to be a part of a VIP program at the fair.”
“Photofairs has become a melting pot of cultures where fine-art photography is celebrated in a truly international way.”