Pace Beijing.

(This post marks my first report on Chinese contemporary art. I hope it will be continued by many more)


Pace Beijing is beautiful.

Last Wednesday I went to the 798 gallery district in Beijing, so named because it lays on 798 street in the northeast of the city. 798 is an interesting place because it’s only really appeared in the mainstream awareness in the past few years, but it’s grown to such an astonishing degree that it has become one of the top 3 tourist attractions of China. It goes without saying that right now, Chinese contemporary art is pretty huge.


And the recently opened (August 8, 2008) Pace Gallery in 798 is on top of it. You may or may not know the Pace Gallery in New York city. It’s an important showcase for established contemporary artists already famous and the gallery comes pre-loaded with a taste for Chinese contemporary art, having taken on Chinese performance artist Zhang Huan. Pace’s Beijing gallery is a step towards the international art market and a show of faith in the Chinese contemporary art scene (Doubt: see Sotheby’s future canning of its Chinese contemporary art expert).

If the first show is any indication, Pace Beijing is going to be a great place in the coming years. It has the size, the capital and the potential to lead the Chinese art scene in becoming less ramshackle and more professional. On top of all of that, it has space. It has some of the best space for art that I have ever seen in my life. In short, it is fucking beautiful.


The show that’s on right now is called Encounters. It’s billed as a call and response conversation between the leading lights of American contemporary art and the stars of the Beijing scene. Most of the art deals closely with the idea of portraiture, a face, a person. All the usual suspects are there, Alex Katz, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman. The surprise comes when you see the names on the other side of the list, including the likes of Ma Liuming and Yang Shaobin, who have never before found this high-profile critical comparison. There are no explanatory labels or wall-text save for the artists names, presented in English and a Chinese transliteration. The show doesn’t need it. It’s a game-changer anyway.


Encounters is made up entirely of two dimensional works. It sets up a kind of leveled playing field where the action occurs in the arena of the canvas.* At times it seems like you can actually feel the works talking to eachother. Two particularly apt curatorial comparisons:

A Cindy Sherman Baroque portrait recreation next to a photo of Ma Liuming, early close collaborator with Zhang Huan. Both female artists are intensely focused on performance and both have an eminent, personal and physical presence to their work.

A Qi Zhilong painting of a smiling female Cultural Revolution era-worker, pure pop appropriation, next to a dashing Katz portrait of Ada.* Both are up close face, face, face. It serves to show off Katz’ brilliant surfaces and underscore Zhilong’s lack thereof.


The show is punchy, it has a rhythm to it, and to top it all off it’s filled with exemplary pieces of work from each artist. Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami are even there. Murakami presents a big stunning red skull right by the floor to ceiling windows in the front of the gallery. Yue Minjun’s manically grinning face haunts its own corner. Ma Liuming, an artist few may know before this, is a barrage of life force out of her portrait. Wang Guangyi, whom I had discounted before, shows a huge painting that leaps off the wall: COUNTRY –AND DNA. You really have to stand in front of these things. Baselitz is here but he doesn’t do much. But then he comes off better than Marlene Dumas’ white/black kids. Fang Lijun shows an enormous orange head surrounded by birds, cool for its presence but perhaps less than substantial. Jeff Koons’ painting, ordinarily a pet peeve, even looks good. The empty-headed, manic-bliss-shot barrage of pop seems to have something in common with the still teething Chinese painters. Far off in the distance Zhang Xiaogang’s closed-eyed silent dreaming head floats, untouchable as a memory.


Encounters is lucid. Encounters sets out to make a conversation and makes it without hedging. Encounters brings together some of the best examples of established American contemporary art that Beijing has seen in a while. The show puts Chinese artists, oftimes regarded as flashes-in-the-pan and accorded with less than respect, up against the favorites. And they survive. They cling tenaciously to their space. The fact that Pace’s first show tosses together such a heap of international artists and not only survives but thrives is, I think, a sign of things to come both for the gallery and the Beijing art scene.


More photos below the notes.

*1) Note: The Cindy Sherman is obviously a photograph and so were a few others. However, The term canvas is oh so much better than ‘false-space-created-by-a-c-print’

*2) Pretty sure it was Ada. Aren’t most of them? No title labels does create some problems.