Hong Kong Arts Centre’s 5th Collectors’ Contemporary Collaboration

In 2013, as part of its 35th anniversary celebrations, Hong Kong Arts Centre (HKAC) started its series of exhibitions titled “Collectors’ Contemporary Collaboration (CCC)” featuring art collections from around Asia, to better understand the Asian contemporary art ecology. Since its inception, the series has featured collectors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia and Japan, and has provided a platform for public viewing of important private contemporary art collections. As Cissy Pao Pui Lai, Honorary President of HKAC, writes in the catalogue for the “5th Collectors’ Contemporary Collaboration”, now open at HKAC, the study of art collectorship serves as a means to understand the development of local art scenes and art markets, as well as their relationship with their counterparts worldwide.

In 1993, HKAC hosted “China’s New Art: Post 1989”, which provided a window into the Chinese contemporary art scene and its practices, paving the way for the Centre’s increased involvement in understanding the development of art in China. With this year’s collectors show, HKAC introduces the diversity of China’s collecting landscape, further amplifying the picture of the latest developments in the Chinese art scene. In 2015, China ranked fourth among the countries with the highest number of private contemporary art museums, coming in close after South Korea, the United States and Germany, and surpassing Italy. Most of China’s private museums are also open to the public, contributing to the promotion of contemporary art and the cultivation of a local audience.

The 5th show in the HKAC series features art collectors Lu Xun, Guang Yi and Zheng Hao, alongside archive collectors, art historians and curators Fei Dawei and Gao Minglu. With this presentation, art historian and guest curator Ling Min aims to demonstrate the diversity of Chinese contemporary art collectorship today. Born between the 1940s and 1980s, the five collectors hold diverse experiences and concepts of collecting and diplaying their collections, which they started for different purposes, including academic, historical and documentary. As Connie Lam, Executive Director of HKAC, reveals in the catalogue, the three art collectors all contribute in a different way to the development and understanding of Chinese contemporary art, while the archive collectors play a key role in documenting the history of Chinese contemporary art exhibitions between the 1980s and 1990s. By presenting the five collectors together, the show tracks the evolution of collecting in mainland China in the past 40 years.

In her curatorial statement, Ling Min explains that contemporary art collecting in China can be divided into four phases. The first, from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, was the starting point of the practice, which was undertaken by some artists and foreigners, while local Chinese were still focused on ancient and classical Chinese art. From the late 1980s to the late 1990s, when contemporary art started to ‘take off’ in China, foreign collectors increased in numbers, while locals started their first attempts. Between the late 1990s and 2010, the art market in China started to expand exponentially, with artworks going between foreign and local collectors, while also fetching some of the highest prices in the international contemporary art market. From 2010 onwards, China has never looked back. Its art market and art scene’s growth has been one of the fastest and largest, collections have been sold, donated to museums and institutions, and local collectors have been investing in more art, building museums and contributing to the dissemination of Chinese contemporary art while fostering greater understanding of its practices.

Collecting A History of Chinese Contemporary Art

Shanghai-based Guan Yi (b. 1966, Qingdao) is an ambitious art collector. He first came upon contemporary art in the 1980s, when he encountered the Chinese avant-garde, such as the Chinese Cultural Fever and New Enlightenment Movement, and started his involvement with art. Influenced by the ’85 New Wave, he started trading in art in 1993 and by 2000 he turned his attention to collecting, founding the Guanyi Contempoary Art Archive in 2004, a space in Beijing dedicated to the research and display of his collection. His main interest lies in creating a professional archive of the Chinese conceptual art development through the collection of contemporary Chinese art. Quoted in the catalogue, Guan Yi has stated:

The key [of collecting] is to collect the motive, internal reasoning and thinking of the artist.

Guan Yi’s collection follows three main criteria: interested in the content and creative process, he collects serialised works and documents rather than singular ones; he focuses on artist groups rather than individuals; and lastly, he aims to represent the different movements in Chinese contemporary art, thus placing great emphasis on the historical aspect of his collection. In 2014, he also donated 37 artworks from his collection to M+, including the major pieces featured in the “Canton Express” exhibition. Among the artists from his collection presented at HKAC are Geng Jianyi, Gu Dexin, Huang Yong Ping, Wu Shanzhuan, Zhang Peili, Xu Zhen and Yang Fudong.

A Collector Entrepreneur

A cultural entrepreneur and a graphic design graduate of the China Academy of Fine Art, Zheng Hao, born in the early 1970s, merges art collecting and entrepreneurship to create a new understanding of art that makes use of his commercial experience. His ’empire’ includes a luxury hotel and an art museum, fusing art, design and technology. He founded HOW Art Museum in Wenzhou in 2013, and in 2017 he opened HOW Art Museum in Shanghai to provide an international platform for cultural exchange and exhibitions, promoting a cross-disciplinary approach and cooperation.

In his early years of collecting, Zheng Hao was interested in craft, his first piece being an ivory work bought in Beijing in 1999. At the time, he was alos drawn to European silverware and Chinese cloisonné. After he established his commercial venture in 2004, he started collecting contemporary art to create a modern artistic environment in his hotel. As his collection grew, Zheng built a museum to house it in Zhangjiang, Shanghai. Onehome Art Hotel became the symbol of his collecting idea, which bridges art collecting and commercial enterprise. Art is not only housed within the galleries, but also throughout the hotel’s spaces and restaurants, and displayed through a public programme of outdoor shows that promote a cross-disciplinary approach to art and life, fusing art, design and technology.

Zheng Hao’s collection includes several works by German artists, such as Markus Lüpertz and Joseph Beuys. In 2013, Zheng facilitated the first exhibition of Joseph Beuys in China, with more than 300 works from his personal collection. At HKAC, both artists’ works are on show.

Collecting the Creative Process

Listed among “The World’s Top 100 Art Collectors” by artnet, Lu Xun (b. 1983, Nanjing) is the youngest of the collectors in the show. The Cambridge graduate is currently a board member of the Acquisitions Committee at Tate Modern and a founding member of Delfina Foundation’s Asia Pacific Committee. He sees the creative process as more important than the work itself when collecting art. With the ambition of building a museum, Lu Xun invited more than 20 architects to submit projects for experimental buildings to be displayed in an exhibition titled “Chinese International Practical Exhibition of Architecture”. The collector’s private museum, Sifang Art Museum, founded in 2013, was part of the show, designed by American architect Steven Holl. The architectural projects previously shown form part of a permanent display of the architecture collection at the museum.

At the Sifang Art Museum, Lu Xun has organised artist residencies inviting international artists to create works on site, which become part of his collection. For him, collecting, creating and exhibiting art are symbiotic elements that need to flourish together. He also believes that collectors should have a more active role in the art world, as quoted in the catalogue:

Collectors need to take effective and significant actions to create dialogues with the existing art ecology.

At HKAC, works on display from Lu Xun’s collection reflect its diversity, both geographical and disciplinary. Photographys of architectural projects are on show alongside works by artists such as Lee Kit, Firenze Lai and Oscar Chang Yik Long from Hong Kong, and Xu Zhen, Zheng Bo, Liu Wei and Wang Wei from China, among others.

Collecting Exhibition Archives

Fei Dawei and Gao Minglu both present archives of exhibitions they curated. The two both worked to present the “China/Avant-garde Exhibition” in 1989 at the China Art Gallery in Beijing, Fei Dawei as an organiser at the beginning of his career and Gao Minglu as the curator.

Gao Minglu (b. 1949, Tianjing) studied art history at the Tianjing Academy of Fine Art. He was editor of Meishu (美术) from 1984 to 1990 and contributed to Fine Arts in China (中国美术报), both of which were influential in China’s art world at the time. Through them, Gao researched the contemporary trends in Chinese art, and curated “’85 Youth Art Movement Large-scale Slide Show”. He wrote extensively about the avant-garde of the time and was a major proponent of the ’85 New Wave, which led him to curate the 1989 exhibition in Beijing, highlighting experimental practices from around the country. The archive material on show at HKAC is from this important exhibition.

Fei Dawei (b. 1954, Shanghai), a founding director of Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contempoary Art, instead presents an archival collection of more than one exhibition he curated in the 1990s, which brought Chinese contemporary art outside of the country for the first time. Fei, a 1981 art history graduate of the Central Acadamy of Fine Arts, was also editor of an art magazine, Art Research, (美术研究) throughout 1985, and like Gao he was involved in the avant-garde art scene, helping in the organisation of the 1989 exhibition in Beijing.

While teaching in France in 1986, he started organising the landmark exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre”, which took place at Centre Pompidou in 1989, showing the work of Huang Yong Ping and Yang Jiechang for the first time, alongside Gu Dexin and Pan Dehai. In 1990 he curated the first major exhibition of Chinese contemporary art outside of the country, “Chine Demain pour Hier” in Pourrière, France, including the work of Huang Yong Ping, Yang Jiechang and others like Cai Guoqiang, Chen Zhen and Yan Peiming. A year later, he curated “Exceptional Passage” in Fukuoka, Japan. The archive from Fei Dawei’s collection at HKAC documents these important exhibitions that showcased Chinese contemporary art abroad for the first time.

Presenting these diverse approaches to art collecting, the 5th exhibition in the “CCC” series provides a cross-section of contemporary art practices in China, through the eyes and experiences of collectors of different generations and with at times divergent, yet complementary ideas of what a collection should be made of. Furthermore, as curator Ling Min states,

This exhibition outlines contemporary art in China from three different collector aspects through collections and archives. Due to the vast size of China, the art scene in different regions largely varies from each other and this 5th edition focuses primarily on private collections in the eastern and coastal areas to review the history of leading cities.

C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia

“The 5th Collectors’ Contemporary Collaboration” is on view from 27 March to 22 April 2019 at the Pao Galleries, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong.