After the epidemic, the pattern of the China Art Fair has changed, based on the construction of the value chain of the local art ecology, compatible with the voice of artistic diversity from local and overseas, with an international professional organization and work structure, facing collectors and art audiences from local and domestic areas, and activating and linking the art and cultural resources of the city where the art fair is located, opening the entrance to digital and public participation, which will become the future trend of the development of the art fair. As a result, the 2021 Beijing Contemporary Art Fair, which opens on October 13, may become an example for local art fairs to build a new art market pattern.
The 2021 Beijing Contemporary Art Fair was held at the Beijing Agricultural Exhibition Hall
The 2021 Beijing Contemporary Art Fair opened on October 13-17 at the National Agricultural Exhibition Center in Beijing. This year's galleries, VALUE and FUTURE, bring together more than 8,000 works of art from 54 galleries, mainly local and some international faces. 24 galleries from Germany, Including Mai Xi from Germany, Shiraishi from Japan, Hideshi Ota, Deyutang in Shanghai and Blue Bank Gallery in Shenzhen, made their debut at the Beijing Contemporary Art Fair.
In addition to the works of important Chinese contemporary artists Xu Bing, Zhang Xiaogang, Liu Xiaodong, Liu Wei, Cao Fei and others, you can also see the works of important overseas artists such as Kiki Smith, Yayoi Kusama, Nawa and Kohei, Sugagi Shio, Miriam Cahn, and other important overseas artists, as well as new works by Lu Xingye, Chen Dongfan and other young Chinese artists.
Exhibition site of Beijing Contemporary Art Fair
Including the above participating galleries, this year's Beijing Contemporary Art Fair brought together more than 90 exhibitors, and the art fair site was divided into six units, including "Value", "Future", "Public Expectation", "Digital Placement", "Vitality" and "Set Time", which were distributed in Halls 1 and 3 of the Agricultural Exhibition Hall, showing the art ecology based on Beijing and China from different perspectives, as well as the cultural, commercial and technological derived energy released by art.
After 3 p.m. on the day of the opening of the Collector's Preview on October 13, the Beijing Contemporary Art Fair in the Agricultural Exhibition Hall was already crowded, and in addition to local artists, collectors and art professionals, they could also meet collectors from all over the world and envoys from various countries invited by the Beijing Diplomatic Service Bureau, and many audiences from many different fields from art, culture and diplomacy gathered, which was also the only one seen in Beijing after the epidemic.
The selection of the "Best Booth Award" is a traditional selection project on the first day of the opening ceremony of Beijing Contemporary VIP, and the winners will receive the first booth of Beijing Contemporary for free in the next year. This year's judges include Tang Xin, head of the art collection department of Taikang Insurance Group and director of Taikang Space, Tian Feiyu, director of UCCA Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Ye Ying, editor-in-chief of Art News/Chinese Edition, professor of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, visiting professor of Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, doctoral supervisor Wang Lin, artist, professor of CAFA, and Zhang Zikang, curator of CAFA Art Museum.
Bank Gallery booth scene
The BANK Gallery from Shanghai won this year's Best Booth Award, and the group exhibition of the artists from inside and outside the group boldly shows the capture and expression of the current social state and new concepts of art, presenting the works of six young artists, Chen Zhe, Tim Crowley, Nik Kosmas, Lin Ke, Austin Lee and Heidi Voet. At the entrance to the booth, Cohori's fictional exhibition poster randomly mixes the artist's name, future time, available images and eccentric exhibition titles, while Nick Kosmas's sculpture Bliss in the center resembles a sacred icon born of the cult of technology, Heidi Fuote's weaving series I Am Destined to Be with You is made of recycled T-shirts, and used clothing that was originally meant to be a personal slogan and image, handwritten notes and hacked computer data are cleverly sewn together. Linko's UV prints joke about Leonardo da Vinci's classic Madonna and Son in a playful manner.
Bank Gallery in Shanghai was founded by Matthew Matthew, an American who has been stationed in China for many years, during the epidemic, Matthew was inconvenient to travel to and from China, but the operation of the gallery in Shanghai was not affected, when BANK won the best booth award of this year with this Chinese-foreign mix-and-match plan, Matthew himself was not at the Beijing Art Fair, but participated in the Frieze Art Fair held in London at the same time this week, and it can also be seen that the offline art fairs in Beijing and London are picking up.
A number of galleries that have participated in Art Basel Hong Kong and Art & Design Shanghai, are known for their deep originality and adherence to their own tonality, and have also brought performances that are not inferior to Hong Kong and Shanghai at The Beijing Contemporary Art Fair.
Pace, who has been working in China and Asia for many years, is probably the most local international gallery in China. Based on the team in the Beijing office, Pace Gallery has brought the appearance of a first-line gallery composed of important artists from China, Japan and the United States, and is also the expression of the consistent high-level works and booth design brought by Pace Gallery. As a specially recommended international artist for this year's fair, Kiki Smith's work was presented at the Pace Gallery booth and consisted of two paintings and a brass wall sculpture. The almost life-size female figures in the paintings and the images of stars and spiders common in the artist's work together frame the artist's discussion of death, family, and women. In addition, the booth also presented the works of five artists, including Yin Xiuzhen, Hong Hao, Qiu Xiaofei, Xiao Yu, Ming and Huang Ping.
Pace Gallery booth site
At the Star Space Gallery in Beijing, artist Zhang Wei's large-scale oil paintings on canvas, which have just opened at 798 Gallery Space, occupy a prominent position. Since 2012, the artist has been painting on canvas on a Harley-davidson motorcycle, and this unintended and morphologically constrained crushing traces have created an unexpected impact and appeal on the canvas. Liu Huanzhang's animal sculptures, corresponding to this, show a kind of calm calm on the retro beige booth. In addition, the booth also presented a photographic work by Liu Xiangcheng and paintings on the shelf by Liu Shangying, Li Shan, Qiu Jiongjiong, Wang Yifan, Chimney, Zhang Hui and other artists.
Star Space booth site
The Vanguard Gallery from Shanghai presents a solo exhibition by young artist Chen Xingye on paper translating music with paintings. The center of the booth showcases the artist's hand-painted reproductions of 80s New Wave music records, which are used as the starting point, the artist's brush becomes a tool for stealing melodies, and the abstract rhythms and emotions are embodied as forms and kinetic energy, finding a balance between the inner and the outside in the dynamic, writhing posture.
Vanguard Gallery booth scene
The Contemporary Tang Art Center, which occupies two large-scale exhibition spaces in Beijing, has brought a group exhibition of artists Such as Zhao Zhao, Tan Ping, Chen Danqing and other artists promoted by a group of galleries, and the mixing and matching of large exhibition spaces with artists of different styles is also a long-term artistic energy projection of the gallery and 798. As a regular visitor to the art fair, the backbone of the primary market such as Shanghai Wuding Gallery and Beijing Blank Space, as well as the local-based artists cultivated by each other, also supported the main face of Chinese contemporary art creation that the fair hopes to present.
Founded in 2007, Chengdu Thousand Plateaus Art Space brought a greenery from the southwest this time. As one of the few booths at the expo site located along the window and directly exposed to sunlight, a series of dappled points of light fell on the canvas oil paintings of Wang Jun, an agent artist at The Thousand Plateaus Gallery. The work is based on the artist's solo exhibition Moss, which opened in the gallery in March this year, which showcases the artist's recent series of sketches in the forest and the "re-photographic" journeys that have been conceived in it. "Returning to the deep forest, re-illuminating on the moss" is a famous sentence in Wang Wei's poem "Lu Chai", in the artist's view, "re-illumination" is not only the process of continuous movement of natural light and the changing experience and cognition in the concept of painting, but also the action and perception of accidental, empty, deliberate and out-of-control interlaced. In the small-scale series "Untitled (To Wang Wei)", Wang Jun, as a translator, continues to repeatedly translate and imitate the sentence "Return to the deep forest and look at the moss", and engages in dialogue with this poet more than a thousand years ago in a visual form. At the same booth, Wang Jun's group of green paintings, Zhai Liang's group of animal-based watercolors on paper and Wang Chuan's abstract ink on paper series constitute the most "green" booth at the art fair, and also present a local tone that is quite different from mainstream contemporary art.
Thousand Plateau Art Space booth scene
The Guangzhou-based Vitamin Art Space/Shop turned the booth entirely into a participatory reading space, bringing with it two published works. From Semiotics to Energetics Volume 1 | Zheng Guogu: The Garden of NoWhere guides us through a series of perceptual experimental spaces constructed by the artist Zheng Guogu in his hometown of Yangjiang. At the same time, in response to the guangzhou-born artist Cao Fei's successful solo exhibition "Time Stage" held at the Ucca Ullens Art Center from March to June this year, the booth also brought a paper publication "Cao Fei: HX" that echoed the interdisciplinary research project of the "Hongxia Film Theater" in the exhibition. "Nova" is a science fiction feature film derived from the "Hongxia" project as the base and subject, and this booth also presents four photographic works related to this. In the noisy art fair space, the store creates two quiet, flexible reading spaces, and you can see its projection of the mirror garden space hidden outside Guangzhou in autumn beijing.
Vitamin Art Space/This Shop Booth Site
Meyer Riegger in Berlin, which entered the Beijing Contemporary Art Fair for the first time, brought the works of three female artists, and Miriam Cahn from Switzerland, born in 1949, is a female artist who has been rediscovered internationally in recent years and has attracted the attention of many Chinese collectors, who participated in the group exhibition "Spirit and Scenery" held at the Sifang Museum of Contemporary Art in Nanjing last year, and a group of works brought by the gallery has been booked. Mai Xi Gallery also brings works by two female artists born in the 1970s and 1980s, Ulla von Brandenburg and Anna Lee Hecht. Three female artists born in different generations, all bring portraits in a more figurative style, close to the international art issues of recent years, such a group exhibition of female artists, which is the recent mainstream of the Frieze Art Fair in London this week, and placed in beijing contemporary art fair with a mixture of different styles of Chinese contemporary art, it is also refreshing, and it is also a chic window for local collectors and the art community to understand the international voice.
Booth at Mai Xi Gallery
Mai Xi Gallery booth artist Miriam Kahn works
As the booth no. 1 gallery at the entrance to the expo, Huer Space, which works simultaneously in Beijing and Berlin, explores the diverse facets of reading behavior in the form of art books. Since winning the Gallery Week Best Exhibition Award in April for Rafael Domenech's solo exhibition, the gallery has continued to bring many of the artist's works to the center of the booth, where the artist's specially designed publications are presented in miniature architectural structures on the curved cutting display stand, a series of ready-made products and urban landscape images nested and combined with each other, deconstructing the text in the repeated speculation of the form, and playing with the audience together with the light installation above the booth.
Huer Space booth site
Qingying Art Space, which works simultaneously in Hangzhou and New York, brings works by chen Dongfan, a young artist active in China and New York, with particular attention to a large-scale work in Brooklyn in 2017, Pain and Glory, which is named after the autobiographical film of Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar, which shows the moment when the soul is about to leave the body in bright fluorescent colors.
Chen Dongfan's "Pain and Glory" on Qingying Art Space
Although the pandemic has shrunk access to international art, Beijing remains one of the most international Chinese cities for contemporary art creation, with Miller Gallery working in Lusen and Beijing, Switzerland, and HdM Gallery at Beijing 798, which also has space in Beijing, Hangzhou and London. The local nature of contemporary art itself naturally has such a mixed-race characteristic, and it is precisely such a pluralistic dimension that makes contemporary art still in the cracks of the post-epidemic situation, retaining the vitality of low-altitude travel.
What is an art fair? It is the superposition of the triple space of the shopping mall, the art museum and the market arena, after Bao Dong, artistic director of the Beijing Contemporary Art Fair, summed up the cognition and construction of the art fair in an interview with the media.
"Counting" units
The art fair also opened the door to digital and the public, and the new unit "Digital Placement" integrates digital technology and installation forms, inviting national first-class stage designer Ren Dongsheng and Blackbow founder Wang Zhiou to create immersive interactive installations according to the on-site environment of the art fair. Baidu Encyclopedia Art Project and Naive Ideal Country show how digital information and knowledge consumption can help the dissemination of art. Top Collector TopHolder focuses on the new possibilities of NFTs and art collections in the virtual world. The "Zhongwang" section presents the works of 16 artists: Ai Jing, Gao Yanfa, Gao Yu, Hao Jingfang & Wang Lingjie, Huang Yiwei, Ezao she, Li Jinghu, Li Jingxiong, Liu Haigang, Liu Ke, Liu Shaodong, Newman Nuyata, Pu Yingwei, Xu Binjueyi, Xu Qu and Zhang Ning in the various public spaces of the Agricultural Exhibition Hall.
As an international exchange partner of Beijing Contemporary Art Fair, Beijing Diplomatic Service Bureau invited envoys from various countries stationed in Beijing to organize the main art fair exhibition and exchange activities. The art fair is one of the key activities of the 9th Beijing Huimin Cultural Consumption Season, and will also be integrated into the cultural life of local citizens. Article/TANC
(Article from TANC)