ULLENS CENTRE for CONTEMPORARY ART

Beijing 798

Chinese contemporary art has blossomed and then ballooned in what seems like just a few years. In reality the sources of can be traced at least as far back as the dramatic changes in China of the 1980's. Groups like Beijing's Redgate Gallery have been beavering away promoting Chinese art for a decade. In 2008 and in time for the Olympics, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall and the historic hutong district have been joined by the 798 art district as a must-see for visitors to Beijing.

A clear indication of the new prominance being enjoyed by Chinese contemporary art was enormous amount of publicity around the recent opening of the The Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA). UCCA, in the 798 Art Complex, is a non-profit but comprehensive art centre founded in Beijing by collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens in November 2007. UCCA presents exhibitions of established and emerging artists and develops a trusted platform to share knowledge through education and research.

UCCA's website (http://www.ucca.org.cn/) offers a short history:

ABOVE: UCCA opening

On March 1st, 2008, Jerome Sans joined Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) as its new director. The Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) is a non profit art Centre founded in Beijing by collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens in November 2007. UCCA presents exhibitions of established and emerging artists and is developing a trusted platform to share knowledge through education and research. The arrival of Jerome Sans initiates a phase of new developments following UCCA's successful launch led by artistic director Fei Dawei.

Fei Dawei's leadership, as well as his contributions to the preparation and successful opening of UCCA, has been indispensable. Before the art Centre project began, Fei Dawei was responsible for organizing research, collections, and exhibitions for years as director of the Ullens Foundation. Under his professional guidance, the Ullens Foundation became one of the most active organizations promoting Chinese contemporary art worldwide and also one of the largest Centres for the collection of Chinese contemporary artwork within two years after its establishment in 2003. Fei Dawei's rich experience in organizing exhibitions and his comprehensive knowledge of Chinese contemporary art circles led the Ullens to invite him to lead the preparation and opening of UCCA as artistic director. Since 2005, Fei Dawei has been instrumental in the successful establishment of the art Centre and was the curator for the opening exhibition: '85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art. During this period, he also continued his work as director of the Ullens Foundation. Having set the organization of UCCA on the right course, Fei Dawei has now chosen to concentrate on his primary interests of academic research and promoting art education.

'85 New Wave - The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art
By Fei Dawei (UCCA press release)

Fei Dawei

'85 New Wave is an exhibition that takes a step back from this commercial fray to examine a unique episode of art history when China began reinventing its own culture. The 1980s in China represented a kind of explosive answer to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, when China was not only cut off from the rest of the world, but was also forced to disown and renounce its own culture. Suppression of such a powerful culture could only be met with an equal and opposite force. The result of this explosive reaction was the '85 New Wave Movement. This search for new artistic language and dialogue sent art-ists in pursuit of multiple lines of enquiry. After decades of political movements, the line of modern Chinese artistic development had been seriously eroded, leaving only traces from which to reinvent a new culture. Forced to work almost from scratch, artists instigated a parallel and alternative contemporary art history to the West that brought Chinese art from strict socialist realism to mature experimental and conceptual practice in just a few years. Consequently, this will be the first time that a comprehensive exhibition of this period will be presented to the public since the 1980s.

Between 1985 and 1990, a group of over one thousand young Chinese artists living in an environment without galleries, museums, or any systematic support for art and with unprecedented enthusiasm and passion, led a fundamentally influential artistic movement. It marked the end of a monolithic artistic model, achieving unprecedented freedom and opened a path for Chinese art to march toward internationalization and contemporaneity. After 1985, contemporary art irreversibly became the driving force behind Chinese art. This is the famous '85 New Wave Movement.

The '85 New Wave Movement represents a watershed in contemporary Chinese art history, which departed from the old time and pointed out a new direction. This movement also cultivated a group of artists that have impact in the world, with their works influenced and changed the direction and structure of Chinese and world art.

And yet today, our understanding of this incredibly important period in Chinese Art remains remarkably limited. Aside from a small number of printed materials, we are rarely able to see original works from the '85 Period. A great number of works were lost or dispersed abroad. This is the first retrospective exhibition of the '85 Movement twenty years after it has run its course, but luckily we have found many important works from this period. In this process, we have been fortunate to have the enthusiastic support and encouragement of many artists and collectors, allowing us to re-present a basic outline of this precious period to the public. This exhibition also marks the publication of many previously unpublished documentary materials and manuscripts, allowing the viewer to bear witness to the deeply layered intellectual activity of the period.

But the enthusiasm was not just restricted to the home team. The following is from one of many web sites Shanghai Journal:
http://shanghaijournal.squarespace.com/journal/2007/11/4/the-ullens-center-and-chinese-new-wave-art-from-the-1980s.html

Last night I attended the opening party for the new Ullens Center in the 798 Arts District in Beijing. The Ullens Center takes up a large factory space across from the bookstore/cafe Timezone 8. It has been nicely renovated and painted in white. The center functions as a museum and knowledge center for Chinese arts, showcasing the Ullens collection. A friend of mine in the art world who invited me to the event told me that the Ullens couple has struggled hard to get this center going. Baron Guy Ullens is apparently from Belgian royalty with a long lineage of collectorship and he and his wife Myriam have been putting a lot of their considerable financial weight behind the building of a substantial Chinese art collection. The Ullens Center is meant to serve the people of China, and others around the world, as an educational center for contemporary Chinese art. It may not be the Pompidou, but it's a big step in the right direction.

Another view came from the site The Art Newspaper:
(http://www.theartnewspaper.com/current/index.asp#Web)

French curator Jerome Sans is expected to be announced as the new artistic director of the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing at a press conference in Paris on Tuesday. Speaking to The Art Newspaper last month, Guy Ullens, the Belgian foodstuffs baron who has entirely funded UCCA, said that Jerome Sans had been selected as the new director and that an announcement would be made as soon as the appropriate Chinese authorities had approved the appointment.
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If all goes according to plan, Mr Sans will replace UCCA's current artistic director, Fei Dawei, the Chinese art critic, who is to step down from operational matters and take on a research-based role. Dawei curated the museum's inaugural show "85 New Wave: the Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art" which received mostly positive reviews in the international press but divided opinion in Beijing.

The UCCA press office downplayed the staffing changes, saying that Dawei's original remit was only ever to be "instrumental in setting up the centre as a museum."

However when Dawei was presented to the press at the opening of the museum last November he was described as UCCA’s full-time, long-term artistic director. Mr Dawei could not be reached for comment, however, sources in Beijing say that Mr Dawei's disagreements with his colleagues are believed to be behind his change in role.

Jerome Sans is a distinguished figure in the contemporary art world but his appointment will leave UCCA open to criticism that there are no senior Chinese members of staff at the institution (deputy director Colin Chinnery is half British).

Born in 1960, Mr Sans has worked for the Milwaukee Institute of Visual Arts and helped establish the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2002. Most recently, he served as Programme Director at the Baltic arts centre in Gateshead, England, but stepped down last July after just 14 months in the role.

The British Council's site described Colin Chinnery in 2006 thusly:
(www.britishcouncil.org/ china-artsandculture-ukartsinchina-aftershock-curators.htm)

Colin Chinnery

Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Ullens Center for the Arts - a new contemporary art museum in Beijing opening in autumn 2007. Working in conjunction with the Ullens Foundation, the space will be 5,000 square metres in size, with a programme of major international exhibitions, artist led projects, library and archive, and a comprehensive cultural programme. It will be the first international level contemporary arts organization in China.

Between 2003 - 2006 he was British Council Beijing, Arts Manager. After that he worked on a UK Contemporary Art retrospective (as co-curator). The exhibition was designed to stimulate public reaction and discussion. Traveling to National Art Museum of China, Shanghai Art Museum, and the Guangdong Museum of Art, this exhibition will bring the Young British Artists generation, including Damian Hirst, Tracy Emin, etc., to China for the first time.

"A Book from the Sky" by Chinese artist Xu Bing.
http://english.cri.cn/4026/2007/12/12/1481@303850.htm

The Chinese art circle saw the most lavish opening in recent memory. A string of high profile banquets and press conferences put Fei Dawei, the Artistic Director of UCCA and curator of the opening exhibition '85 New Wave, in the spotlight. Our reporter Ramond has the story.
Reporter:

Standing in the spacious hall of UCCA, one can't help but be captivated by a large installation called "A Book from the Sky" by Chinese artist Xu Bing. This giant book occupies about 50 square meters in the central exhibition room. All the characters in this book were invented by the artist himself by imitating ancient Chinese characters. More intriguing than that is the book was printed in the movable typing mold, an ancient printing technology created about 1000 years ago in China.

Fei Dawei, curator of this exhibition has this to say: "When the '85 New Wave artist Xu Bing created this work, he intended to make an incomprehensible book. As one representative of this contemporary art movement, Xu Bing wanted to convince the public that the language and concept lies within the artwork can constitute art itself. It's a break away from the realistic tradition where the meaning and story told through language is the core of artist creation."

Indeed, "A Book from the Sky serves as the manifesto of the '85 New Wave movement.

The movement represents a watershed in contemporary Chinese art history. As the liveliest part of the entire intellectual liberation movement of the 1980s, it marked the end of a realistic era that had dominated art in China since the early 20th century. After 1985, contemporary art became the driving force behind the art scene.
Its appearance was no doubt a direct cultural result of the reform and opening policies that were being implemented at the time by the Chinese government.　
The movement also marked a highpoint in Chinese art history, which gave rise to a batch of globally influential works and artists. The force of their talent and passion has changed the shape of art both in China and abroad ever since.

Among these ardent participants is Fei Dawei, one of the most prominent art critics and curators who mounted the retrospective exhibition of the '85 New Wave two decades after the birth of contemporary Chinese art. Having been living in France for 20 years, Fei Dawei has been dedicated his life to bridge China and the world beyond it.
Born in 1954 in Shanghai, Fei has served on the juries of UNESCO's Art Awards since 1995 and was awarded the Medal of Knighthood for Literature and Art in 1999 by the French Ministry of Culture.

"I went to France in 1986 for the first time as a visiting scholar. The visit turned out to be of great importance. Besides giving lectures on contemporary Chinese art, I interviewed a large number of important artists, curators and art critics in France. That experience greatly widens my horizon."

Based on more than 1,200 slide works of the '85 New Wave artists, Fei Dawei started a series of lectures in galleries, art institutes and universities across France in an effort to channel China's explosive contemporary art to the rest of the world.

"I was involved in a cultural communication during my stay in France. I came to understand what the western world needed and what China needed and the gap between the two. France at that time had already completed the process of cultural renovation. In contrast, China was experiencing an art explosion. Yet the French part of understanding this incredibly important period remained remarkably limited: their expectation was that contemporary art didn't exist in China."

Fei's efforts soon attracted attention from the French art circle. In 1987, famed curator Jean-Hubert Martin asked Fei to be his consultant in appointing a few Chinese artists for an important exhibition being planned. The project was later extended as the groundbreaking art fair "Magician of the Earth" at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989.
"The theme of this exhibition was to encourage equal communication in the art world from a truly open and global perspective. Therefore, an equal number of 50 artists from the west and other parts of the world were selected respectively. I nominated three Chinese artists, namely, Huang Yongping, Gu Dexin and Yang Jiechang, to take part in this exhibition."

"Magician of the Earth" was an epoch-making event after which post- modernism, globalism and multicultural concepts began to become pervasive in various international art exhibitions.

"I would say the presentation of the Chinese artists came quite as a surprise to the western audiences. They were shocked to know the explosive development of contemporary art in China. More importantly, the achievement of the '85 New Wave artists also went beyond their expectation. For instance, "The Reptile" created by Chinese artist Huang Yongping was said to be the best, not just one of the best, in this exhibition."

The '85 New Wave was a movement of modernization, to the point where some claim that Chinese artists traveled the course of a century of western art history in just a few short years. But this westernizing movement was itself a force that renegotiated the place of art in Chinese reality, opening new possibilities for true self- expression. "Magician of the Earth" paved the way for China's contemporary art movement into a larger world.