In addition to a host of ravenous zombies and a fractured Scottish family, 28 Years Later features one of the most famous public artworks in the UK: Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, a 1998 sculpture that towers above the A1 roadway near Gateshead.

The Cor-Ten steel sculpture takes the form of a figure who stands 66 feet tall and spreads its 177-foot-long wings. It’s thought to be seen by millions of people annually and has become a calling card for Gormley, a Turner Prize–winning sculptor due to receive his biggest US survey to date in the fall, at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

Angel of the North has rusted over since its debut, and its oxidized surface comes to take on a post-apocalyptic feel in 28 Years Later, where it appears in an overgrown field, having been abandoned amid failed attempts to curtail a rage-inducing virus that has run rampant in England.

Gormley’s sculpture rhymes with 28 Years Later’s fascination with spirituality—director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland set the opening set piece partly within a church—but it’s also enlisted by the filmmakers in their critique of conservative British politics. (Such a critique may appear oblique to some, but within the UK, few have missed the point. We won’t spoil the out-of-left-field ending, which makes explicit reference to a certain British celebrity who was posthumously accused of rape.)

On its face, Angel of the North does not seem so scandalous. Gormley said he intended the work as a tribute to the miners who once worked in the area where the sculpture is now sited. “When you think of the mining that was done underneath the site,” he once said, “there is a poetic resonance. Men worked beneath the surface in the dark. Now, in the light, there is a celebration of this industry.”

But in a 2019 New York Times interview, Gormley said that the work was actually a rebuttal of the policies of Margaret Thatcher, a Conservative prime minister whom the artist said had made it seem as though “everything that had come out of the Industrial Revolution” was “over.”

The work was initially controversial, not for responding to Thatcherite politics but for its look, with many local politicians claiming it was an eyesore. Jewish residents of the surrounding area also said the work reminded them of German aircrafts, leading Gormley to be labeled a Nazi by certain outlets.

More recently, however, Angel of the North has found itself at the center of a different hot-button debate: the conversation that preceded the 2016 vote on Brexit. That year, the anti–European Union group Vote Leave projected the words “Vote Leave Take Control” across the angel’s wingspan. That moved Gormley himself to send a letter to Vote Leave in which he said that the stunt implied a “false endorsement” on his part of the group’s cause.

In a statement on his website, Gormley writes that Angel of the North was the product of “a focus for collective hope”—something not notably possible in 28 Years Later, in which quarantine acts as a parallel for post-Brexit isolationism.

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The Headlines

INSIDE JOB? Officials in New York have obtained an arrest warrant for antiquities collector Georges Lotfi on charges of possession of stolen property, the New York Times reports. They have seized two dozen items from Lotfi’s holdings that they say were looted, most of them mosaics from Syria and his native Lebanon. The collector, who had tipped off investigators to illegal trafficking in the past, has denied wrongdoing. He remains at large, but did an interview with the Times, and said, “I was fighting with them for 10 years to stop illicit trading, and they turned against me.” In the past, Lotfi apparently invited law-enforcement officials to see some of what he had in storage in Jersey City, New Jersey; authorities argue that his efforts to cultivate a working relationship with them were aimed at shielding his own activities from suspicion.

NOTCHING A WIN. Some students at Imperial College London have recently said that they are not fans of a sculpture that Antony Gormley has proposed for the school’s grounds, arguing that it has a “phallic” quality to it (you can click and decide), but another U.K. school will soon be home to a new Gormley, the Art Newspaper reports. Cambridge’s city council signed off on a plan to install at King’s College a 12-foot-tall piece by the British superstar—an abstracted body made of cubic forms—that aims to commemorate the renowned 20th-century mathematician Alan Turing, who was persecuted for being gay. This piece had also generated some controversy, with Historic England reps saying back in 2020 it “would harm the particular character” of the school.

The Digest

British artist Lubaina Himid has won the 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, which comes with $200,000 and exhibitions at the Contemporary Austin in Texas and the FLAG Art Foundation in New York. [ARTnews]

A shooting at the Indian Museum in Kolkata on Sunday killed one police officer, and left another injured. A soldier alleged to have opened fire has been arrested. [ArtReview]

The first part of a two-part expansion of the Motown Museum in Detroit has been completed. On Monday, stars like Smokey Robinson and Otis Williams visited to toast the milestone. [The Associated Press]

In his latest dispatch from Ukraine, critic Jason Farago looks at how museums worked to safeguard their collections as war approached. “We had to start from scratch,” photographer Roman Metelskiy, who was part of those efforts, said. “We were asking for packaging materials. For financial support.” [The New York Times]

Benjamin Keating’s latest show, at Tripoli Gallery, in Wainscott, New York, features sculptures that incorporate bonsai trees. Doing business with “famous bonsai guys” was not easy. “It’s like they don’t want to talk to you,” he said. “They don’t want to deal with you.” [The New Yorker]

The Manhattan home of Stacey Bendet, the fashion designer who founded the Alice + Olivia brand, and her husband, investor Eric Eisner, features a gargantuan Francesco Clemente, works by Julian Schnbael and Ron Gorchov (among others), and a dining table designed by Lola Montes Schnabel. [Architectural Digest]

The Kicker

IN LIVING COLOR. The venturesome art dealer Magda Sawon, cofounder of the nomadic Postmaster gallery in New York, sat in the hot seat for Curbed and answered its “21 Questions.” The color she is most drawn to? “Blue, from the super-extreme Diana Vreeland navy blue to Yves Klein blue to a cloud where the whiteness is touched by a tiny, tiny amount of pigment,” Sawon said. “My favorite film is Blue, by Derek Jarman, which is nothing but blue for 60 minutes.” [Curbed]

Students at the Imperial College in London have decried an Antony Gormley sculpture that is set to be installed at the school’s revitalized South Kensington Campus, citing its allegedly “phallic” nature.

The sculpture, titled ALERT, is meant to represent an abstracted figure shown in a squatting position. But the students claim that it looks more like a man with an erect penis.

In a politely worded motion, the students wrote, “Regardless of artistic intent, Alert is interpreted by many as phallic.”

“There is nothing inherently wrong with phallic imagery in art,” they continued. “However, the phallic interpretation’s preoccupation with the penis could be considered inappropriate for a grand public display, especially given the statue’s size.”

ALERT, set to be installed this summer, is nearly 20 feet tall; the portion that juts out, which could represent either a set of bent legs or a penile shaft, is itself 10 feet long.

The statue is meant to adorn the newly built Dangoor Plaza, which is flanked by a library and a chemistry building. That the sculpture would become a focal point for a section of the school associated with the sciences rubbed the student union the wrong way, given the “issues with gender ratio and inclusion” in the sciences at the College and in the wider world.

The Art Newspaper commented that the Imperial College has a severe gender imbalance among its student body, with only 39 of those enrolled there being women, according to university-supplied data.

In a statement made prior to the students’ motion, Gormley said of the sculpture, “Through the conversion of anatomy into an architectural construction I want to re-assess the relation between body and space. Balancing on the balls of the feet while squatting on its haunches and surveying the world around it the attitude of this sculpture is alive, alert and awake.”

ARTnews has reached out to Gormley for comment in response to the student union’s motion.

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The Headlines

WATER FINDS ITS OWN LEVEL. First, the bad news: The Cosquer Cave, which is located off the coast of Marseille, France, and filled with prehistoric paintings, is at risk of being completely flooded because of climate change, the Associated Press reports. The better (though not exactly great) news is that a virtual replica has been created and was put on display in Marseille this past weekend. On a related note, artists Mark Bradford, Andrea Bowers, and Jenny Holzer are presenting an ambitious art show in Los Angeles this week that aims to draw attention to the climate crisis, the Los Angeles Times reports. Holzer is showing her trademark text pieces in a variety of formats (billboards, light projects). One reads, “We have the fundamental right to a livable future.”

GREXIT. Sculptor Antony Gormley, who has mounted many high-profile productions in his native Britain (Angel of the North, for one), said that he is obtaining German citizenship in response to the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union, the Guardian reports. “I’m embarrassed about Brexit: it’s a practical disaster, a betrayal of my parents’ and grandparents’ sacrifice to make a Europe that was not going to be divided again,” Gormley said at a press event for his new retrospective at the Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, the Netherlands. “It’s a tragedy.” The artist, who has a German mother, expects to receive the new passport next month.

The Digest

Two French graffiti artists—Julien Blanc and Pierre Audebert, who went respectively by Jibeone and Full1—were killed when they were struck a train in New York in April. The international graffiti community has been mourning. [The New York Times]

The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra will need to spend AU$87 million (about US$62.9 million) over the next five years on internal repairs and upgrades to its buildings, internal documents show. At the moment, only AU$20 million (US$14.5 million) has been allocated, leaving a “budget black hole in wait for new Arts Minister Tony Burke,” Linda Morris reports. [The Sydney Morning Herald]

The OpenSea NFT platform has been accused by some users of not doing enough to prevent theft and plagiarism. Its leadership said it is taking steps to combat those issues. “Like every tech company, there’s a period where you’re catching up,” its chief, Devin Finzer, said. [The New York Times]

On Friday, police were investigating a death that occurred at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. Additional details about the case have not been reported. [Telegram & Gazette]

The artist Lydia Ourahmane will soon have her installation Barzakh on view at the S.M.A.K. museum in Ghent, Belgium, a recreation of her onetime apartment in Algeria with 5,000 of her possessions. She does not mind people looking through her stuff, she said. “There’s nothing in my life that I’m ashamed of really, because my life is pure.” [The New York Times]

Here is a look behind the scenes of the recent (secret!) auction of a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut for $143 million—the most ever spent for a car on the block. Simon Kidston, the car expert who helped engineer the sale, said that the winning “client took the view that he would pay whatever it is.” [Vanity Fair]

The Kicker

TIES THAT BIND. This past weekend, artists Luke George and Daniel Kok used rope to tie up five players from the Australian Football League (Australian rules football, for the uninitiated) to recreate a famous play from a 2011 game, as part of the Rising festival in Melbourne. Interviewed before the event at the National Gallery of Victoria by the Guardian, George said that he was expecting “people who are avid footy fans, people who are there because of Rising, and people who like rope bondage—something fascinating can come from creating this space.” [The Guardian]

What objects serve as inspiration for some of the world’s most esteemed artists? International enterprise Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is providing insight into that question in a new video series, and it’s starting with British artist Antony Gormley. Acclaimed for sculptures and public installations that explore the relationship between space, time, and the human body, Gormley is the subject of the first episode of “Artist’s Eye,” a new weekly series debuting from Thaddaeus Ropac today.

Throughout the series, artists will introduce audiences to a treasured belonging, explaining its history and influence on the creative process. For Gormley’s episode, shot at his home, the artist walks viewers through the formation of his treasure: a smooth, calcified fossil made from ancient single-cell organisms. Turning the pale stone between his fingers, he tells viewers how the fossil is the product of millions of creatures.

How did it come into Gormley’s possession? What about its nature resonates so deeply? With the measured tone of a college lecturer, he provides the answers.

“This a sculpture made without the hand of man, made by the processes of nature, that nevertheless speaks to us about life, about our place within the sequence of time and life that we are part of,” Gormley says in the video. “I suppose I would like to make things that are as inevitable as this…. This took millions of years to make, will last for many thousands more years, and remains for me while my life exists as a continual inspiration to go on finding and seeking forms that can touch heart and mind.”

Watch the full video below.

The K-pop sensation BTS is extending its reach in the art world with CONNECT, BTS, a new contemporary-art initiative that will span five international hubs on four continents. The members of the globe-trotting group were inspired to launch the project as part of an effort to create a “collective, positive message for the world that we value,” as they put it in a statement.

The independent Korean curator Daehyung Lee serves as artistic director for the project, which also involves Stephanie Rosenthal, director of the Gropius Bau in Berlin; independent curator Noémie Solomon; Ben Vickers, chief technology officer at the Serpentine Galleries in London; Kay Watson, digital curator at the Serpentine Galleries; and Thomas Arnold, principal at Alta Art Production in New York.

A series of art projects—all to be free and open to the public—launched on Tuesday with the debut of a new audio-visual work titled Catharsis by Jakob Kudsk Steensen at the Serpentine Galleries in London; the work, which immerses viewers in the life cycle of a forest, can also be experienced online via a dedicated website. On January 15, Gropius Bau in Berlin will present a series of spiritually minded performance pieces by more than 17 artists (including Jelili Atiku, boychild, Cevdet Erek, Marcelo Evelin, Maria Hassabi, and Antonija Livingstone and Bill Fontana).

For other manifestations of CONNECT, BTS, Tomás Saraceno will create the work Fly with Aerocene Pacha, through which the artist will float a person in the air using only solar power—with footage from the making of the artwork at Argentina’s Salinas Grandes t0 be screened in Buenos Aires from January 21 to March 22. At Seoul’s Zaha Hadid–designed Dongdaemun Design Plaza, public exhibitions of Ann Veronica Janssens’s sensory environment Green, Yellow, Pink and Yiyun Kang’s digital environment Beyond the Scene will be on view.

Finally, Pier 3 in Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York will host Antony Gormley’s New York Clearing, which—from February 4 through March 27—will comprise 11 miles of aluminum tubing that coil and arc in space to create a three-dimensional drawing. Visitors are encouraged to walk through the monumental installation, which was recently presented on a smaller scale at the Royal Academy in London.

In a statement, Lee, the curator, said, “The significance of art, whether it consists of sound, sculpture, photography or another medium, is its innate potential to forge a relationship between artist, viewer, the immediate environment, and the atmosphere which encircles and extends far beyond. This project will encourage appreciation of diversities and establish ground for great new synergies to be born.”

A statement attributed to BTS as a whole reads, in part, “This project is especially meaningful to us because it truly represents diversity and creates a collective, positive message for the world that we value. Through this project, we hope to return the great amount of love and support from our fans, ARMY, and all audiences.”

This year’s Shanghai Biennale takes place amid China’s new money-fueled turn to Western art.

IN 2000, the third Shanghai Biennale marked a turning point in East-West art relations. Fully contemporary and fully international for the first time, the millennial event, overseen by the globe-trotting Hou Hanru, included just enough academic and tradition-based material to placate Chinese officialdom, while placing its major emphasis on experimental work, which is what “contemporary art” means in China. The exhibition thereby signaled the eagerness of many artists, dealers, and curators in the People’s Republic of China to embrace the US-and-Europe-dominated art system, after enduring the strictures of Mao’s Socialist Realism (1949–76) and the bleak struggles of progressive artists in the 1980s and ’90s. This desire was even more evident in the half-dozen satellite shows put on by artist groups and independent curators in alternative venues around town. Curator Feng Boyi and artist Ai Weiwei’s now legendary “Fuck Off” exhibition caught the renegade spirit of those heady days and nights.

Sixteen years and eight global roundups later, the current Shanghai Biennale (on view through March 12) seems, at first blush, to fulfill the welcoming drive of 2000. Encompassing ninety-two individual artists and groups from forty countries, the show looks and sounds like any other serious world survey these days. That is, it features formally diverse, concept-heavy work, some of it socially engaged, thoroughly mediated by the critical rationale of the curators, in this case the Raqs Media Collective from India. Artists, curators, and theorists all, the three-person team (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) offers an up-to-date mix of mediums and themes in which Chinese artists, like those from around the world, are presented as the prime cutting-edge seekers and questioners of our time. In this exhibition, every artistic convention, every social condition, is open to examination, while complacency is explicitly taboo. “Why Not Ask Again?” serves as the Biennale’s title and mantra, tirelessly reiterated in all its print and digital support items.

Roughly concurrent with the exhibition’s November 11 opening, meanwhile, was a welter of activities that would have seemed like a fever dream to the artists who showed in dingy, out-of-the-way spaces sixteen-plus years ago. Shanghai Art Week, distracting and diverse, brought some very impressive resources to bear: exhibitions of international work in many of the city’s galleries and private art museums; the newly opened Fosun Foundation, commissioning work and dispensing art prizes; an interactive installation project sponsored by a company devoted to bringing Western public art to China; the expansion of the West Bund art district; and two simultaneous art fairs, both mixing top-name Western and Asian galleries.

It’s tempting to look at this scene and simply see money, a game of cultural catch-up by the newly liberalized and newly affluent. Certainly Shanghai’s phantasmagoric skyline encourages such thoughts, as do its luxury malls and hotels, its flourishing restaurants and clubs, all reflecting the fact that China’s economy, although no longer boasting the double-digit annual increases of recent decades, is still the world’s second-largest and still posts an annual growth rate of over 6.5 percent, compared to the US’s 1.5 percent in 2016. ¹ The Chinese art market, meanwhile, may have declined in sales value by 23 percent and slipped from second place to third (behind the US and Britain), yet it still constitutes 19 percent of the world’s total, surpassing Europe and all other countries combined. ²

Yet the proliferation of Western art in the nation’s museums and galleries today signals something quite new: an unprecedentedly high interest in Western work on the part of Chinese curators, dealers, and collectors. Sixteen years ago—even five years ago—the sight of contemporary Euro-American art in a commercial venue in China was an anomaly. At that time, Chinese collectors were avidly buying Chinese, a proclivity that insulated the country’s artists from the worst effects of the 2008–09 global art market dive. But since then, disillusionment with domestic art speculation and the blatant corruption of the Chinese auction system, coupled with the inability of any more than a handful of Chinese artists to penetrate Western critical consciousness and the Western marketplace, has generated a new mindset. Collectors are increasingly inclined to seek the relative predictability of “brand name” modern and contemporary Western art, while curators see the equal regard for, and frequent commingling of, Western and Chinese works as a means for validating China’s own cultural production.

Thus, after earlier phases of exile (from the mid-1980s to the late ’90s, when some of China’s finest talents went abroad to build careers) and then exportation (from the late ’90s to 2008, when big-name artists lived domestically but sold internationally), we have come to a third phase—that of one-sided integration. Mainland China now fervently practices East-West juxtaposition and synergy—a strategy in which the port city of Shanghai, China’s most cosmopolitan locale, has long-established expertise. Vast private fortunes are now combining with governmental development policies and funds in this process, whose trappings are glitzy and, at times, louche.

On November 7, the Fosun Foundation invited two hundred cultural notables to its new 43,000-square-foot building, designed by Foster + Partners and Heatherwick Studio. The three-story venue, which boasts a “veil” façade and an installation of LED numerals by Japan’s Tatsuo Miyajima, now awaits future commissions by Julian Opie, Leandro Erlich, and Felice Varini. Presenters such as Klaus Biesenbach, director of New York’s MoMA PS1, and Philip Tinari, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, distributed achievement awards to seven Chinese artists (Cao Fei, Yang Fudong, Xu Zhen, Liu Wei, and Zheng Guogu, plus “millennial” recipients Zhao Yao and He Xiangyu) and two Beijing galleries (Long March Space and Beijing Commune). More striking than the winners themselves, however, was the manner of their selection. The market-tracking website Artnet gathered data on some two thousand candidate artists, assigned numeric grades to their shows, critical citations, and price performances, then used “social computing” algorithms to determine their overall standing.

Two nights later, the West Bund Art & Design Fair opened at the West Bund Art Center complex, part of a five-mile cultural corridor that the district government has established along the Huangpu River. The fair, directed by 1990s art star Zhou Tiehai, who formerly headed one of China Minsheng Bank’s two contemporary art museums in Shanghai, prides itself on its invitation-only gallery selection, with David Zwirner, Pace, and Sadie Coles among the thirty participants chosen this time.

Across a plaza from the fair, ShanghART, one of the anchors of the funky but long-established M50 (50 Moganshan Road) art district, celebrated its twentieth anniversary by inaugurating a rambling new space (its third concurrent Shanghai locale, in addition to branches in Beijing and Singapore) with a group show called “Holzwege.” The German term, elevated by Heidegger, refers to an overgrown forest path known only to woodsmen—a fair description of the route followed by Swiss-born dealer Lorenz Helbling. Shanghai’s pioneering and still most astute dealer of contemporary Chinese art, he has nurtured figures such as Yang Fudong, Xu Zhen, Ding Yi, and Zhang Ding. In the gallery’s mix that celebratory night were works by German artists Markus Lüpertz and Jörg Immendorff. Nearby in the compound, the solo painting show “Alex Katz: West Broadway and Spring” was presented by London dealer Timothy Taylor. Work by the UK’s Martin Creed was on view at Qiao Space, a showcase recently launched by mega-collector Qiao Zhibing, whose private Tank Shanghai museum (one hundred thousand square feet of exhibition space in five lavishly refurbished former industrial oil storage tanks) subsequently opened in December.

After the West Bund festivities, Qiao threw a massive party at one of his entertainment-business holdings, the four-story club Shanghai Night, decorated with many examples from his ten-year-old collection (Liu Wei, Zeng Fanzhi, and Ai Weiwei, cheek by jowl with Olafur Eliasson, Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, and Damien Hirst). There, the mere arrival of Takashi Murakami caused a rock-star commotion and selfie-frenzy. Onstage in the cavernous main room, performances included dancers wearing gasmasks and Martin Creed singing badly with an amped-up acoustic guitar. Partygoers who ventured to other areas of the club encountered deluxe karaoke rooms and a bevy of young hostesses wearing evening gowns and conveniently numbered ID tags.

 

HOUSED IN the Power Station of Art, a riverside electricity generating plant that was converted in 2012 to the first state-sponsored contemporary art museum in China, the Biennale this time places a heavy emphasis on “curatorial thinking”—something all visitors can supposedly share in—along with a pan-Asian alternative, or supplement, to the Western contemporary art nexus. To promote curatorial equity, Raqs Media Collective brought in seven young auxiliary curators (none European- or American-born), installed works in formal or thematic affinity groups, and set up citywide guided walks and storytelling sessions by local residents in places like an open-market fish stall.

The Power Station, with its roughly ninety-foot-high atrium and 160,000 square feet of exhibition area, virtually demands a certain number of space-devouring installations. Raqs met the challenge with works like Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s So Far (2016), three pairs of enormous ceramic crocks vacuum-sealed together to resist the futile efforts of opposing forklifts to sunder them.[pq]The curators have preserved a sense of adventure—of works and connections made for serious, noncommercial reasons.[/pq]Other examples include the circular LED-lined rooms of Croatian artist Ivana Franke’s Disorientation Station (2016). But for sheer spectacle, nothing could surpass The Great Chain of Being—Planet Trilogy (2016), created by Chinese theater director MouSen and his scenography company MSG. The gargantuan work, which one enters through something resembling a giant aircraft fuselage, draws visitors into a sensory overload journey, rife with passageways, random sounds, works by more than forty artists, and a kind of mirrored moonscape into which a crystalline cylinder has crashed, producing a small crater.

Such extravaganzas are counterbalanced, particularly on the two upper floors of the Power Station, with somewhat more contemplative, mutually consonant works. On the third floor, for instance, the American artist Lisa Tan’s video linking ocean waves, sound dampening “pink noise,” and the formation of human consciousness (Waves, 2015) is matched with Chinese artist Zheng Chongbin’s floor-to-ceiling 3D wave of ink and paper on metal (Wall of Skies, 2016), and a black inflatable ocean raft completely flattened and dismantled on the floor (Plastic Raft of Lampedusa, 2016) by the duo YoHa, composed of British artist Graham Harwood and Japanese artist Matsuko Yokokoji. Some of the Biennale artists address vital social issues in no uncertain terms. For one, Indian artist Vinu V.V. contributes Noon Rest (2014), comprising multiple sickles stuck in a tree trunk, his deft evocation of a strike by low-caste field workers protesting their exclusion from village schools.

To its credit, Raqs has preserved within the Biennale the sense of adventure—and of works and connections being made for serious, noncommercial reasons—that prevailed both inside and outside the official exhibition hall (a quaint colonial structure then housing the Shanghai Art Museum) back in 2000. Now the Power Station is, for the duration of this event anyhow, a sanctuary from the twenty-first-century art marketplace that engulfs it.

This is not to say that the curators can do no wrong. In their press materials, “raqs” is said to be a word in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu that refers to the mental state attained by whirling dervishes (other sources mention Egyptian belly dancing). Accordingly, the group members give short shrift to the standard criteria of art historical or critical validity—evidence and reason, clarity and good sense. “When theory gets to work, it sings,” they proclaim in the show’s handbook—meaning that, for them, thinking about art is a form of creative performance, an expression of subjective states. Predictably, a good deal of verbal silliness then ensues. See, for example, their list of twenty-two key Biennale questions, ranging from the sophomoric (“What happens when worlds collide?”) to the nonsensical (“How chromatic is the fragility of spectres?”).

A more serious problem is the curators’ much reiterated advocacy of an alternative global neighborhood, or network, for non-Western cultural workers. Their systematic identification of artists not by nationality or ethnicity or artistic concerns but by city of residence—Beijing, Delhi, Ramallah, Vilnius, Jakarta, Moscow—makes the return-of-the-repressed nature of this nodal approach evident. Fair warning to the New York–London–Berlin axis. There is a mirror world out there, its increasingly impatient “second tier” denizens interacting with social-media intensity.

This reaction to Western imperviousness is entirely understandable. But, apart from endorsing an old-fashioned cultural regionalism that dare not speak its name, it also comports disturbingly well with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2013 One Belt, One Road initiative, reestablishing old Silk Route land and sea ties between China and all of Eurasia, thereby aiming to create—and lead—a Cold War–style bloc to counterbalance the democratic West. Perhaps a twenty-third question should be added to Raqs’s list: When will critical theorists wake up to reality?

 

AT THE OPPOSITE pole from the Biennale’s mélange was the Felix Gonzalez-Torres retrospective sensitively and sensibly installed at the private Rockbund Art Museum by director Larys Frogier (who wrote his dissertation on Gonzalez-Torres and previously headed the art center La Criée in Rennes, France) with the Chinese curator Li Qi (a former senior editor at LEAP, a print-and-digital art publication almost unique in China for its critical independence). RAM, which opened in the original Bund district in 2010, occupies an Art Deco building renovated by architect David Chipperfield for the Rockbund Urban Renaissance Project, encompassing seventeen structures.

The show of over forty Gonzalez-Torres pieces was notable both for the tastefulness of its installation and the normalcy of viewer reactions. The artist’s signature themes of love and loss, regeneration and sharing were accepted as wholly valid, Frogier said, his aesthetic strategies fully respected. Censorship was not an issue. (Same-sex relationships and gender change are legal in China these days, although laws against discrimination are lacking.) There were, however, some subtle differences of cultural inflection. In China, licorice is thought of as a medicine, not a confection, so one of the famous take-away piles had a slightly different resonance than it would in the West. The two round clocks mounted side by side and keeping exactly the same time still poignantly bespoke Gonzalez-Torres’s feelings for his dying partner. Yet, for this viewer, they also recalled the fact that all clocks in China are set to Beijing time as a gesture of centralized power and national unity, despite what would otherwise be a range of five time zones. Moreover, China’s timepieces run twelve hours ahead of those in New York, pointing to the same hours and minutes simultaneously, but with a day-and-night difference in meaning.

One of those antipodal contrasts is that in China, as such shows attest, contemporary Western art is either venerated or taken in stride—sometimes with a touch of curiosity or bemusement—while in the West, contemporary Chinese art is still too often greeted with condescension. The talk of the Shanghai art scene last summer was a show of 250 Giacometti works at the Yuz Museum. During the Biennale, the same venue, founded in 2014 by Indonesian-Chinese collector Budi Tek, was given over to both “Andy Warhol: Shadows,” presenting 102 silk-screened canvases hung edge to edge, and “Overpop,” a seventeen-person show that balanced the work of Western artists (e.g., Camille Henrot, Alex Israel) selected by American dealer Jeffrey Deitch with Chinese artists (e.g., He An, Liu Yefu) chosen by Karen Smith, a British-born critic-curator who has lived in China for some twenty-five years. Given the Pop theme, as well as Deitch’s penchant for street-art bravado, and the in-your-face quality of much contemporary Chinese work, one might have expected a fun-house experience. Instead, the show was rather subdued, with works like Samara Golden’s mirrored, perspective-altering room installation The Flat Side of the Knife (2014) setting a semi-formalist tone.

A short stroll away along the Cultural Corridor lies the Long Museum West Bund—one of four private museums founded by the collector couple Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei (best known abroad for their $170.4-million Modigliani purchase in 2015). In the weeks leading up to the Biennale, Wang Wei oversaw “She,” an evenhanded survey of 105 women artists from thirteen countries.

At the ART021 fair in the Stalinist-style Shanghai Exhibition Center, Asian works—like Wang Xin’s interactive installation satirizing the art world at the De Sarthe booth—held their own against contributions by Western artists such as Wim Delvoye (Galerie Perrotin) and Sterling Ruby (Gagosian). Elsewhere in town, Leo Xu Projects offered “Reflexology,” a solo exhibition by Berlin-based Swedish artist Nina Canell. The Chronus Art Center presented technologically oriented works by China’s Liu Xiaodong, Germany’s Carsten Nicolai, and Korea’s Nam June Paik. “Hack Space,” curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Amira Gad, placed New Zealand–born, Berlin–based Simon Denny among eleven Chinese artists at the Shanghai K11 Art Mall, established by thirty-seven-year-old Hong Kong billionaire Adrian Cheng.

At a moment when we all must guard against xenophobic, jingoistic urges, the Real Fiction Cinema project, consisting of three containerlike structures purpose-built by Switzerland’s LOST Architects, seems particularly à propos. The mini-theaters—complete with black interiors, raked rows of seats, and soundtracks of Chinese and Western film scores—were sited for various periods of time at three Shanghai locations: Houtan Park, the Sinan Mansions (a restored colonial-residence enclave, now an upscale shopping and entertainment complex, in the French Concession), and—before the Biennale—on the roof of the Power Station of Art, with a vista of the busy river and the red inverted ziggurat of the China Art Museum. The viewing end of each theater is a rectangular cutout that creates, in quasi–James Turrell fashion, the illusion of a movie screen. As one sits and watches, the world outside becomes, inexorably, one’s own mentally constructed film—a flowing narrative drawn directly from life, subject to both the steady rhythms of city life and the unpredictable actions of pedestrians, some of whom react to the theater with wonder, greetings, and impromptu performances.

Conceived by Dutch artist Job Koelewijn and facilitated by Swiss curator Klaus Littmann, the project owes its existence to the Shanghai-based ArtsRouge International, a firm founded in New York in 2007 by Sotheby’s Institute of Art graduate Xiaokun Sunny Qiu for the pupose of bringing Western public art to China. The Cinema was previously installed in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, where it garnered some two hundred thousand “moviegoers.” Plans call for a tour of ten Chinese cities in all.

In a sense, this work constitutes a Western perspective on Chinese reality, transformed into an enactment of itself. But that transcultural process is enthusiastically embraced by many Chinese visitors and “actors”—perhaps because they sense in it a mutual willingness to observe, to imaginatively engage, and to learn. The project makes one want to say to major Western cultural institutions, “Where is your window on China today?” It’s an essential question, though one too earnest and concrete for Raqs to ask. After all, the already contentious Xi-Trump era is likely to be a geopolitical turning point (do we move now toward East-West reciprocity or toward divisive nationalism?), not only for the one-fifth of humanity that lives in the PRC but for all of us, everywhere.

 

CURRENTLY ON VIEW Eleventh Shanghai Biennale, “Why Not Ask Again?: Arguments, Counter-arguments, and Stories,” at the Power Station of Art, through Mar. 12.

Endnotes

1. Focus-economics.com projections as of mid-December 2016.

2. Eileen Kinsella, “What Does TEFAF 2016 Art Market Report Tell Us about the Global Art Market?” artnet.com, Mar. 9, 2016.

Adrien Brody will show his painting series, titled “Hot Dogs, Hamburgers and Handguns,” at Art Basel Miami Beach next month. [Page Six]

Miami-Dade County Sheriff’s deputies infiltrated Lil Wayne’s Miami Beach house on Tuesday with an order to seize enough property to compensate a $2 million debt Wayne owes to a private jet company. The police took some of the works of art belonging to Wayne’s $30 million collection. [TMZ]

The Guggenheim Museum has opened its first online exhibition, a virtual stock market controlled by online users, at azone.guggenheim.org. [The Art Newspaper]

Antony Gormley will display his 31 cast-iron and fiberglass statues on the rooftops of Hong Kong, after a banker’s suicide from the same rooftops caused a year’s delay. [The Art Newspaper]

Will.i.am’s eyewear brand, ill.i., has partnered with artist Xu Zhen to create a special line. [Garage Magazine]

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., has begun talks with the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art regarding the possibility of borrowing from the Tehran Museum’s collection of international and Iranian art. [Artforum]

“Art-Auction Rivals Aim to Hammer Each Other.” [Wall Street Journal]

Jack Goldstein’s “Burning Window and Aphorisms” at 1301 PE in Los Angeles. [Contemporary Art Daily]

Strong winds caused a life-size cast-iron statue by Antony Gormley installed in Dorset, England, to fall into the sea. [The Telegraph]

A Detroit building owner deals with the reality of alleged Shepard Fairey graffiti on his walls. [The Detroit News]

Willem de Rooij’s “The Impassioned No” at Le Consortium in Dijon. [Contemporary Art Daily]

Edward Snowden with long hair: “Is he a hero or a traitor? Either way, as far as this picture is concerned, he has long hair. The proof is right in front of our eyes, and it’s undeniable.” [Clickhole]

A long-lost painting by an adolescent Rembrandt, titled Oil on Board, Triple Portrait with Lady Fainting, has possibly been discovered in Bloomfield, New Jersey. The painting, estimated at $500-$800, sold yesterday for $870,000 at Nye & Company Auctions. [The Art Newspaper]

Due to a strike, the Musée d’Orsay is closed today—the same day that the much-anticipated “Splendour and Misery: Images of Prostitution 1850-1910” was scheduled to open. [The Art Newspaper]

Harvard Art Museums have appointed two new curators, A. Cassandra Albinson and Rachel M. Saunders, to its European and American art division and its Asian and Mediterranean art division, respectively. [The Harvard Crimson]

Marco Rubio is planning to visit the home of a Hitler art collector on Yom Kippur eve. [Salon]

Sean Penn sent Madonna a note saying that he finally understands her art. [Inquisitr.com]

 

The Japan Art Association has announced the winners of the 25th annual Praemium Imperiale awards: Italy’s Michelangelo Pistoletto in the category of painting, the UK’s Antony Gormley for sculpture, Spanish tenor and conductor Plácido Domingo for music, American director Francis Ford Coppola for theatre/film, and the UK’s David Chipperfield for architecture.

Each of the winners will receive roughly $150,000, the largest prize awarded in the arts. Since its creation in 1989, the Praemium Imperiale has recognized lifetime achievement in areas of the arts that the Nobel Prize does not cover. The recipients are selected from five candidates proposed in each field by a nomination committee. Past winners have included Gae Aulenti, Ingmar Bergman, Frank Gehry, David Hockney, Willem de Kooning, Yayoi Kusama, Renzo Piano and Robert Rauschenberg.

The awards will be presented in a ceremony in Tokyo on Oct. 16.