Waldemar Januszczak
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Chinese art may be the flavour of the month in the auction houses, but where will it finally be placed in the annals of modern art? It is a question that needs to be thought about quickly because, these days, a critic cannot move in the art world without encountering the stuff and, more importantly, because Charles Saatchi has decided to open his vast new museum with a display devoted to it.
The Revolution Continues is a mixed survey of new art from China that achieves mixed results, as you’d expect. The law of averages dictates that a venue as huge as the new Saatchi Gallery can rarely be filled with good art alone. But the criticisms can wait. We need first to celebrate the occasion of the gallery’s opening, because it is a momentous one. After a bout of hesitation worthy of the Grand Old Duke of York himself, Saatchi is finally back on the front line in what used to be the dithering duke’s Chelsea headquarters. Thus the gloves can once again come off in the intriguing art tussle between the professionals and the amateurs that Saatchi began and that has successfully changed the face of contemporary art in Britain. The Tate empire once again has a rival. Let the battle recommence.
Saatchi’s new museum should have opened this spring. It should have opened last spring. But visitors to this posh Chelsea landmark, originally unveiled in 1803 and designed for the Duke of York by the architect who gave us Sandhurst, need only glance at the monstrously tall doric columns guarding its entrance to understand fully why it has taken so long to transform. The former owner’s infamous attempt to march 10,000 men up and down a hill was mere child’s play compared with the task of turning this gigantic Georgian pile into a suitable location for contemporary art. What we have here is a modern art gallery with the dimensions and pretensions of a neo-classical palace.
I have missed the Saatchi Gallery since it closed down in 2005. London has missed it. Modern art has missed it. The old gallery, housed inside the local government spaces of County Hall on the South Bank, may have been a terrible place to show art – the claustrophobic wooden panelling covering every wall soon earned it the nickname of the Coffin - but even in these inappropriate surroundings it was possible to sense the importance of Saatchi’s amateur struggle against the professional art establishment. Having witnessed and written about his adventures since the opening of the first Saatchi Gallery in a converted paint factory in St John’s Wood in 1985, I am certain that Saatchi single-handedly changed the course of contemporary art in Britain. This is not the forum in which to remember in detail how it happened, but having watched the unfolding from close up, I assure you that without his brashness and energy - underwritten by his cash - there would be no Tate Modern; the Turner Prize would still be a dud; Bankside would still be an empty power station; and the relationship between modern audiences and modern art, which is now so active and fruitful, would still be as sullen and distrustful as it used to be.
But that was then. The second most important truth about Saatchi is that he has never been able to match his opening achievements. Nothing has come along in the past decade or so that is as effective as the output of the Hirst generation. Certainly not the frequently feeble Chinese artists granted the honour of opening his newest monster gallery.
It is always difficult to tell from an opening visit what kind of service a new location will provide for the art inside it, but to my eyes, we have here 70,000 sq ft of well-nigh-perfect modern art space. Behind the portentous Duke of York HQ facade, four floors of interconnecting white cubes have been tastefully stacked, illuminated from above by what appears to be a sequence of soft and shrouded roof windows. It’s a beautiful illusion. All the lighting is artificial. But how lofty and airy the galleries appear. Some spaces are spectacular, others modest, as the higgledy-piggledy nature of the original building bequeaths a useful air of variety to the new arrangement. All this is a big architectural improvement on the depressing wooden sarcophagus in which the art struggled so hopelessly in the old Saatchi Gallery on the South Bank.
Unusually for him, Saatchi did not trigger the current enthusiasm for Chinese art. Instead, he jumped noisily onto a rolling band-wagon. The Chinese themselves were the first enthusiasts. Having come into bundles of swag from the Chinese economic miracle, a pushy generation of Chinese wannabes, based originally in Hong Kong, but increasingly hailing from the mainland, set about imitating their western counterparts by buying the local trophy art.
As you go round the show you keep encountering Chairman Mao, popping up everywhere like a proprietorial logo on a range of national goods. Zhang Hongtu shows the chairman taking the place of the kindly Quaker on a tin of porridge oats. Shi Xinning has Mao joining Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the infamous Yalta conference that carved up the postwar world and which, of course, Mao did not actually attend. Qiu Jie paints a giant pussy cat buttoned up in a Chairman Mao suit apparently to illustrate a simple Chinese pun: mao in Chinese means cat.
What is being reflected here is not only Mao’s continuing embedment in the Chinese consciousness, but also his iconic visual presence. Long before Warhol turned the chairman into one of pop art’s most striking faces, Mao himself had reduced his own image to a set of catchy visual clichés. I can certainly see why mocking him has become the default mode of Chinese art, and why Chinese collectors so enjoy owning these naughty counters to the Cultural revolution. It’s like teasing the gorilla in a zoo. But Chinese political pop art — Pol Pop? — leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth. When someone has been as brutal as Mao was, and murdered as many as he did, giggling about him behind his back seems a flimsy riposte. What is called for here is Beethoven and not the Cheeky Girls.
The most celebrated of the new Chinese painters, Zhang Xiaogang, whose prices begin at £1m these days and then soar, is more serious than the political popists, but his work suffers instead from a chronic repetitiveness.
Basing his paintings on the family photographs that were banned in Mao’s day — the people had a new family now: China — Zhang churns out melancholy face after melancholy face in a seemingly endless procession of haunted national stares. A thin thread of red joining up all the interchangeable grey figures explains why the entire kitsch series is called Bloodlines.
The other big Chinese auction favourite, Yue Minjun, who paints madly grinning citizens sarkily expressing their happiness at being part of the communist system, could also do with having another idea. At least his paintings have a manic energy to them.
Saatchi, who hangs his own exhibitions, has sensibly split up these over-represented artists so that your journey round the display remains constantly eventful. While none of the painting rises too far above the level of magazine illustration, there are much better efforts to be found among the sculptors. In particular, that old Saatchi favourite, shocking body art, pops up here and there to give the proceedings a welcome jolt. The moment you walk into the show you are confronted by Xing Jing’s giant female nude flashing her extra-large parts at you in a hugely disconcerting display of porky pinkness. Zhang Dali, meanwhile, has filled one of the bigger upstairs galleries with an army of naked figures suspended from the roof like the carcasses in a butcher’s fridge. Pale and podgy, Dali’s unhealthy, mass-produced, suspended sausage shop of citizenry says something disturbing about the social importance of the human being in modern China.
In another of the upstairs galleries you encounter what seems to be a chap with a crazy hairstyle licking the floor. You need to get very close to him before you realise he is a sculpture by Cang Xin. This extreme realism is a gallery trick originated by the sculptor Ron Mueck, whom Saatchi has previously discovered and supported. Recurrently in this show you feel that the discoveries of western contemporary art have been borrowed by the Chinese, repeated, perfected and then shipped back to us. Few of the exhibited artists can be called originals.
The main exceptions are Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, a working couple responsible for both the show’s highlights. Upstairs, there’s a horribly realistic fallen angel, well past his pension age, who has crashed to the ground in a scary sprawl of uncared for ancient flesh: what a vivid metaphor for dashed hopes. And down in the Saatchi basement,
in the show’s outstanding work, a morgue-load of life-sized old timers in working wheelchairs circles the gallery continuously in a creepy display of geriatric dodgems. Although none of the ancient figures is an actual portrait of a world leader, all of them have something of the world leader about them: Yasser Arafat’s headgear; Fidel Castro’s medals; Archbishop Makarios’s black robes. Are they dead? Are they asleep? It matters not. In this spooky old people’s home for former power-brokers, the endless game of global politics whirrs uselessly on.
It’s a brilliant and utterly pessimistic piece of work.
Without it, the opening banquet at the new Saatchi Gallery would consist of too many turkeys.
'This is art, mate'
Saatchi on China, the artist as celebrity and why he’s like Mahatma Gandhi
Why China?
If China’s economy keeps growing as it has, our children will all be speaking Chinese in 50 years’ time. When I first looked at the new Chinese art, I thought it was horrible, and most art that looks horrible at first stays looking horrible. Occasionally, though, the really awful ones nag at you to go back for a second and third look, and they worm away until you finally get it.
Why now?
Now that I have the zeal of the newly converted, I feel compelled to proselytise.
Is the exhibition about Saatchi the collector, or Saatchi the salesman?
It’s about the art, stupid.
Do you believe in it all?
I am not clever enough to be a cynic, so belief is the only option available to me.
Is there not a paradox somewhere? How can you be so shy and yet so voluble?
I am neither shy nor voluble. I don’t like going to parties, but I do like showing off my art. I am quite comfortable with my schizophrenia.
Have you ever taken advantage of anyone in the art world?
If you asked the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa or Mahatma Gandhi if they had ever taken advantage of anyone, they would be lying if they claimed they hadn’t. So you can put me right up there with them, thanks.
What is your proudest achievement?
I don’t do pride. That’s not to say I don’t have an ego the size of an aircraft hangar, but I’m not even very proud of that.
Do you feel responsible for the British art scene as we know it?
No.
What keeps you going?
What’s the alternative?
Do you still care about money?
I have never cared enough about money to worry about spending it, and have been fortunate to make enough to be spoiled rotten.
Do you care what people think?
Everyone cares what some people think, but luckily I seem to care less than most.
Professionally, what was your greatest mistake?
That is a really depressing question. I have made so many mistakes, and such really stupid ones, I would start blubbing away if I could remember even half of them. But do not dwell on cock-ups, I say. You don't learn by your mistakes — at least I don’t — so best to blunder on making fresh ones.
Is modern art political?
Is modern politics art?
What do you buy apart from art?
I have a shocking Frappuccino habit, so what doesn’t go on art goes to Starbucks.
What is the nature of the relationship between Charles Saatchi and the artists?
I don’t buy art to ingratiate myself with artists or socialise in the art world. Most of the artists I meet are rather like everybody else you meet: some are nicer than others.
Did Charles Saatchi’s activities make London the centre of contemporary art?
London is not the centre of contemporary art.
What about Manchester? Could it happen anywhere else?
Not Manchester, I think. But they do football pretty well.
Of which artist are you most proud?
How can I feel proud about an artist’s work? I didn’t have the idea, and I didn’t make the art. There’s no pride to be had by simply buying it.
What are your thoughts on the rise of the artist as celebrity?
Better to be a celebrity because people talk about your art, rather than your wedding photos, in Hello!
What do you like about the “old geezers” piece in the show by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu?
I’m rather looking forward to my wheelchair years. Nigella has already fixed me up with caring Wife No 4 to push me about and wipe the drool, and brutal Wife No 5 to make me welcome death gratefully.
How do you decide where to put each work?
No subtlety here. I just go by what shapes and colours work together in a room. Occasionally I try putting things together that have a meaningful “link”, and then back off quickly. The poncy way some curators try to demonstrate their “vision” by highlighting connections gives me the collywobbles.
How free are Chinese artists?
Free? Have you seen the prices they ask?
After the semen paintings displayed in your 2006 show USA Today — is there anything you wouldn’t show at Saatchi?
Anything I don’t like.
After China, what next? Can you envisage an Islamic show?
Funny you should say that. I’m working on a show for 2010 called Out of Arabia. What I’ve found so far from Iran and Iraq is encouraging.
Have you got any Chinese stuff at home?
What’s with the “stuff”? This is art, mate.
The Revolution Continues, Saatchi Gallery, King’s Road, SW3
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Its really great for chinese contemporary art to be showcase at this new prestigious venue. The collection has indeed its ups and downs, but people need to look more closely into the fairly comprehensive contemporary chinese art history to discover important artists that do not get their due.
fabien fryns, beijing, PR CHINA
I found your Saatchi mini interview refreshing and inspiring. I need to know why you mention Manchester in your questions.
T. Johnson, Manchester,