Technology: Electric Cars on Canadian Streets

Changan Automobile Group, Ford Motor's China partner, said on Tuesday it will roll out 30 electric cars developed jointly with Electrovaya in Canada before the end of this year, potentially becoming the first Chinese auto maker to tap the North American market.

Electrovaya is set to distribute the car (based on Changan's popular Ben Ben five-door) possibly making this the first automobile from the People's Republic to tap into the lucrative North American market. Of course, wheels like this won't make you any more popular with the ladies (you'd probably want a Linc Volt for that), but we're just happy that there are more Green options out there.

art+capital (part 2)

Shanghai Night - 不夜城

A friend looked at the Shanghai skyline, turned to me and said - "You know, every city now has one of these roof top bars."

Shanghai has always been a global city. Historically, with all the foreign concessions, it was akin to being colonised by multiple nations at one time. Its landscape reflects these influences - the assimilations and tensions, and its status today as an "expat" paradise merely continues that past.

It seems obvious that the art industry and centres of cultural influence are always built around centres of financial power - London, New York, and now, Shanghai+Beijing. Like most service industries, the art industry serves the powerful. As such, if you are thinking of starting an art business, the Chinese art industry offers these lessons:

(1) Land


Today Art Museum in Beijing; Installation at Zendai MOMA

If there's a Chinese Bill Gates and Donald Trump, it would be the latter who would be more likely to open and develop an art museum in China.

The museums of modern or contemporary art in China that I've visited all happened to be private and non-profit. Given the nature of contemporary art, it seemed natural that such museums are operated privately instead of by the state. But another thing these museums often have in common is their close relationship with real estate play. Both the Today Art Museum in Beijing and Zendai MOMA in Shanghai were started by real estate investment giants who collect and enjoy art.

While both non-profit institutions have different business models (I like Today's diversification into art publishing and archival/video documentation services), it is not by coincidence that both are located within new, large commercial or mixed-use developments by their founders' companies. In fact, the Zendai MOMA is gearing up to expand into its glass/steel cube "Zendai Himalaya Complex" nearby, named no doubt for its proportions. While the government has no direct stake in these developments, the promise of a hip contemporary art museum is not only a plus for property buyers/investors but may up the attractiveness of the land bid to the government.

(2) Location Location Location


lift to artist studios at M50

The development of art districts like 798 or the MoGanShan Road (or M50) art district have similar real estate impetus for the owners.

But for some galleries, their strategy is to get out from that competition and circus. And where your gallery is located says much.

ShanghArt's has expanded from its M50 location, and opened a branch on one of Shanghai's main shopping streets, in the compound of a beautifully restored and converted French residence along Huai Hai Rd together with some high-end fashion labels.


James Cohan Gallery

New York gallery James Cohan spent months searching instead for a 1930s building at Yue Yuan Rd in the quiet former French concession. The building seems an unlikely place for a gallery. It is still inhabited by other residents on the other levels, and shares a compound with another residential building with laundry in the balconies and garden. But walk into the Gallery and you will find beautifully restored stained glass, a lovely art deco stair case and terrazo floors, decorative Chinese ceilings and a garden with a stretch of scholar stones. Instead of focusing on contemporary Chinese artists, it is bringing major international artists like Bill Viola to China instead - hence its subtle location.


140sqm in the Black Stone

Former Beijing curator Yue located her new gallery 140sqm in a dark, rundown (by Singapore standards lah) 1920s building called "The Black Stone" a few streets away. Entering the building, you past a tiny room where a woman lies on a beach chair, walk up a narrow mosaic-tiled staircase bathed dimly in orange light, walk down a grey corridor before entering a sunlit apartment of art. Her focus is to discover new Chinese contemporary artists who maintain a strong artistic and intellectual integrity in their work. Asked if the location deters collectors, she says that the location often works to her advantage in attracting collectors curious about the space.

(3) Lots of Money Labour


workers taking a break, backlane of M50

You can't get away from labour if you are running a business. Perhaps taking this to the extreme, Shanghai-based artist Zhou Tiehai openly declares that he has never actually painted anything and pays a team of 11 assistants to execute all his paintings. Conceptually, he is of course locating the art not in the product, but in the conception and the entire process. When asked if his work is then similar to that of a film director and script writer, he agrees but adds that for his latest dessert series, it is his friend, a French chef, who is the actual writer and co-director. When the follow-up question was asked about what then does he actually do, he smiled and said "My job is talking to you."


Zhou TieHai's Studio

Making art is labour-intensive, but in a capitalist context, the real value is reaped not by the workers but the guy who directs the workers and makes the sale. Your labour, as I found out from all the gallerists, is in the service extended to the customer - the talks given at museums, the interviews given to journalists, the hospitality extended to visitors, the advice handed to young collectors, the explanations and stories woven around art works (told perhaps over a cigar in your office), the liaison with shippers and pacifying of worried collectors...

In China, where labour and rental is cheap, you may not need lots of money to get a gallery going (NB. lesson obviously does not apply in Singapore!). But the relationships and trust nurtured with artists and collectors is not something that financial capital can secure. For a few, it is a labour of love.

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Part 1 here

art+capital

A one-day crash tour of the Beijing contemporary art industry could bring you to the following places:

(1) The Art Mall

The Dashanzi or 798 Art District is a district of old dis-used factory complexes and low warehouses/shops inhabited by artist studios and galleries since the 90s, but more distinctly marketed as an art destination in the last few years.

Today, it receives busloads of domestic and international tourists daily, and is the first destination mentioned not only by art magazines but newspaper travel reviews. There are cafes, souvenir stores, bins for recyclable waste, litter-free paved streets, new brand-name galleries from Korea (T-Space), New York (Pace Wildenstein), Italy (Continua)...and a new section supposedly developed with state support and ironically bearing the name "798 Originality Square".


Feng Zheng Jie's new work - glamming up death, decay and consumption.

With all the market hype about Chinese contemporary art, it is easy to decry the rapid developments at Dashanzi and the by-now familiar iconographic paintings of Mao, bald men, grinning or green faces as a kind of "in-authentic", factory (pun intended) art. But art and commerce have always served each other, first through patronage, then through industry. Sometimes the exchange gets too exclusive in its intimacy, and art's other relationships with critical process, society, invention etc appear distant or even absent - but hey, this is not unique to Chinese contemporary art. Perhaps the underlying discomfort is a post-colonial one, that the power in this exchange lies not in China but in "the west", the old boys of the art market.

(2) The Art Bungalow


the dusty neighbour, in the process of Beijing-style "upgrading"

As with all things Chinese, though not unique to China, these contradictions and tensions somehow grow to exaggerated proportions in the Middle Kingdom (not unlike the gigantic faux Parisian hotel across the street from the hotel I am staying in!)

After spending the first half of the day walking around the Dashanzi district, we walked and drove around the Cao Chang Di Art District (Detailed NYT Review here). Cao Chang Di is certainly more subtle than Dashanzi, but the contradictions remain. The Cao Chang Di galleries are mostly foreign-owned or off-shoots of foreign big name galleries. Located in a quiet district of warehouses and new, cube-like brick buildings that are barely visible behind high concrete walls, the mood in the tree-lined district is almost genteel. At the same time, the district sits right beside a still-dusty (very), unpaved warren of homes and little shops.

This maybe sums it up: at the Cao Chang Di, we walked pass what is supposedly Ai WeiWei's sometime studio, cheekily or perhaps very aptly labelled "258 FA KE". A self-parody and a raised middle-finger.



(3) The Art Factory


Xu Zhong Min's work at his studio

If you are lucky, you may get the chance to visit an artist studio.

We were brought to Xu Zhong Min's studio. Located an hour's drive away from the city, you will see, enroute, entire Truman-ville estates of "Little America" bungalows (with SUVs in the drive way and a 3 storey clubhouse) or modern Chinese mansions complete with fancy roofs and circular doorways.

Looking more like some village workshop housing some kind of contraband goods, his studio is in a large gated compound with a L-shaped workshop and an outdoor shed. When we got there, 4 of his assistants were cleaning some fibreglass skeletal figures that would later go on one of his stop-motion rotating sculptures. He tells us he had been to Singapore many times ("if there's a good party"), that a Singaporean collector had just bought another of his works a week ago, and that he works 6 days a week. Then he shows us his personal studio at the back. It is an airy, double-volume 200sqm space.

Trained as a print-maker in a Szechuan art academy before spending some years in the UK, his early print works and more recent oil paintings and prints line the walls. There is an impressive technical finesse and range in his work.



At the end of the visit, I am reminded that for all the cynicism (and perhaps jealousy?) that may now characterise attitudes towards the commercial success of these contemporary Chinese artists, these artists are very skilled and good at what they do, smart, talented, imaginative and inventive. Not forgetting that they work incredibly hard (single-handedly managing their assistants, collectors/gallery owners, production needs and finances), and have been doggedly pursuing their art for years, with or without commercial success.

Talent. Hard work. Persistence. If you don't have all 3 in abundance, I guess neither the art nor the capital will happen.