Fountainheads

DO WESTERNERS take Chinese artists seriously as artists? Or are they merely illustrations of a changing China? Uli Sigg, a Swiss businessman and former ambassador to Beijing, began buying Chinese contemporary art in the 1970s, when artists, often working alone and in secret, were reacting to the political turmoil of the time. His collection of over 1,000 works forms the backbone of what will be M+, the museum of visual culture in Hong Kong, which is due to open in 2019. Until then the Sigg holdings are gradually being unveiled in a series of small shows around the city. Anyone who missed the latest iteration, at Art Basel Hong Kong in March, can catch up with the M+ app.

Displayed against a timeline of political developments, the works on the app trace the growth of China’s artists from the Cultural Revolution, through the upheaval of 1989, and on to the commercialisation that followed after economic growth began to accelerate. To many viewers, it is not the art that matters here, but what the artists were reacting to—and against. Mr Sigg and M+ have made a choice to present the collection as a historical archive. The format is useful for visitors who are learning about modern China and Chinese art for the first time. It pays little attention, though, to the creativity of Chinese artists themselves.

Two other shows have taken the opposite tack. The first is “What About the Art? Contemporary Art from China”, on until July 16th at Al Riwaq in Qatar’s capital, Doha, part of the Qatar Museums network. The second is a show dedicated to the Chinese contemporary-art scene at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. One part is an exhibition of works by 12 artists brought together under the headline “Bentu: Chinese artists at a time of turbulence and transformation”, on until May 2nd. The other exhibition consists of Chinese works from the museum’s collection and runs until August 29th.

The show in Qatar, three years in the making, has been curated by Cai Guo-Qiang, internationally known for his installations made with fireworks and explosions. An ascetic who survives on black tea and a ferocious exercise regime, Mr Cai bemoans the fact that Chinese contemporary artists are often judged by just two measures: their take on the one-party system or the record prices their work fetches at auction. In the show he has created in Doha he focuses instead on creativity.

The overwhelming presence of the Qatari royal family as patrons of the country’s nascent art world makes it hard for curators, even those of Mr Cai’s stature, to operate completely independently. Mr Cai salutes his patrons with a huge family portrait by Liu Xiaodong of the former minister of culture, Hamad bin Abdulaziz Al-Kawari, and his children, as well as small panoramas of Doha and the Qatari hinterland. These will be of little interest to international visitors, even if they draw in local audiences.

But three other pieces that Mr Cai has selected are particularly memorable. Acting as a prologue to the show is an installation by Hu Zhijun, a peasant farmer who discovered sculpture in 2013 at the age of 61. A year later Mr Cai commissioned him to make almost 600 figures, all of them crucial in the development of modern art in China. Painters and video-makers, designers and architects, his figures—mounted on terraces that resemble rice paddies—form a powerful choral voice of artists and artisans. Another work inspired by China’s physical environment is by Xu Bing, a doyen of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. His “Background Story: Shangfang Temple” seems on the face of it to be a traditional Chinese landscape, a translucent sky with brown hills and trees coloured in yellow and green. Step behind the installation, though, and you realise that the hills are made of mounds of rubbish, the trees coloured with abandoned plastic bags.

The third memorable piece in the show has not been seen since the opening of the Yuz Museum in Shanghai in 2014 and never outside China. “Freedom”, by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, is a 12-metre-square metal-plate box containing a fire hose and a high-pressure hydraulic pump. The box has round glass windows at eye level for watching the hose in action—a bucking water-cannon that evokes rampant sexuality and vicious crowd control (though that may not have been obvious to the show’s conventional hosts).

If Mr Cai’s “What About the Art?” concentrates on the creativity of individual artists, the show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris focuses on how artists inspire creativity in one another. On the upper floor, Philip Tinari of Beijing’s Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art and the Fondation’s artistic director, Suzanne Pagé, have grouped together a series of landmark Chinese works from the Vuitton collection. In one impressive room stand both one of Ai Wei Wei’s huge wooden trees linking the heavens and the underworld and one of Huang Yong Ping’s “Fifty Arms of Buddha” series (pictured). Made between 1997 and 2013, and a bridge between past and present, the spiritual and the physical, it pays homage in its shape and conception to Marcel Duchamp’s “Porte-Bouteilles” from over a century earlier.

One floor down and the visitor encounters “Bentu” (“of this earth”), a parallel show highlighting 12 artists returning home to re-examine their roots. They explore not just the anxieties and preoccupations born of four decades of economic transformation, but more existential questions, about hope, anxiety, pleasure and curiosity.

Some are sad, others homesick, still more are confused. Two, in particular, stand out: Qiu Zhijie’s “Map of the Third World”, an exuberant re-depicting of the world with its Lake of the Leaders, its Mount Globalisation and its Plateau of Colonialism all swelling into a global chorus of political narrative. In contrast, “The Woman in Front of the Camera” is a three-minute film by Hu Xiangqian of a middle-aged woman dancing, oblivious to the crowd surrounding her—and utterly entranced. No politics or history; just art for its own sake.