Beijing Art's Coming of Age at Red Gate

If there’s anything China’s first private contemporary art gallery can offer, it’s perspective. On a rare blue-sky day in Beijing, I ascended the steps of the old city wall at Dongbianmen before reaching Red Gate Gallery’s namesake vermillion doors. Looking out, I could see the entire CBD, the low-rise swath inside the Second Ring to its west, and a tiny helicopter hovering among pillars of clouds. “That’s only the second I’ve seen in over 20 years,” gallery owner Brian Wallace tells me. “I wonder if it’s going to the CCTV building; it has a heliport, you know.”

As the pinnacle of a months-long 20th anniversary celebration, Red Gate is presenting “20 Years,” a show in which they’ve invited 11 of their longest-standing artists to each nominate a younger artist. They’ll exhibit their works side by side in an obvious but still appealing symbolic gesture: to celebrate past accomplishments while also looking forward to what’s ahead.

We sat down with two of these artists – Guan Wei of the old guard and his nominee, the new multimedia artist and photographer Wu Daxin – to hear how their experiences encapsulate the past (and future) decades of Beijing’s art scene.

Guan Wei, whose lonely, affecting paintings draw on themes of nautical discovery and rewritten histories, has climbed all the requisite rungs of the Beijing artist’s ladder: he trained during the ’80s, left the country as things heated up later in the decade, became a revered art star in his new homeland, then returned to Beijing just before the Olympics. He’s even had his studio on the outskirts of Beijing demolished. Twice. In fact, he was asked to move out the week before we met. “They gave me one week’s notice .... I’m in the market for a new space.”

For him, leaving and coming back were both natural choices. “I went to Australia because they invited me, for an artist residency program.” And why did he come back? “Overstimulation. Every time, there were so many more galleries, so many more exhibits, and my friends’ studios just kept getting bigger and bigger.”

Wu Daxin agrees. He made his first art piece by freezing a hundred-dollar bill (yes, it’s all about the Benjamins) in the walk-in fridge of a friend’s Sichuan restaurant in New York. When the close-up of the frozen bill sold at his first show, he was struck by the possibility of actually living off his art. Then, when Wu visited Beijing during the Olympics, he was blown away by the scale of the art scene: tons and tons of art magazines, curators, galleries. “The market … it’s like a magnet. Every artist is drawn to it.

“The other thing: China is cheap. You can do things on a bigger scale. In NY, a studio is prohibitively expensive. And hiring 30 people to help put a piece together? Only if you’re a superstar. But in China you don’t have to be a superstar to produce the work you want.” He tested this theory when he built an ice sculpture of a church on the Great Wall. As a “nobody,” he hired a cadre of migrant workers to help carry gallons of water to the site. So what he’s telling us is that art has exploded in China for the same reasons manufacturing has: cheap materials and cheap labor.

“But it’s not just the market,” Guan Wei pipes in. “There’s an atmosphere here. Take my studio getting demolished; it’s a form of calamity. It forces me to fight, because I never know what will happen tomorrow. This unpredictability, it creates these bursts of energy that are irresistible.”

So what do they see as they look out over the next 20 years?
The young artist is practical: “What I observed in America is there’s this very complete system,” says Wu. “Museums, galleries, collectors, artists. If in 20 years, China can have that complete and mature of a system, that would be good. And more importantly, that the public would pay more attention to contemporary art.”

Guan Wei’s response bears the weight of his experiences: “I hope things keep getting better. Higher quality, more varied and meaningful art. That’s the hope. But this is the thing about China: who knows, everything could just disappear. But that would be interesting, too.”

“20 Years” is on show at Red Gate Gallery from Jul 2 to Aug 24.