How does an artist stand out amid that kind of action? The German painter Katharina Grosse modeled an exemplary approach in a solo outing at Gagosian with a dozen large canvases, easily the hardest-punching of any new paintings on offer in the city. Wielding her trademark spray tools, Grosse shot thin bands of overlapping paint diagonally atop white grounds. Her attack was so quick that each tight mass of acrylic appears to be blazing across the surface, smoking at its edges. The paintings deliver an almost comic dose of wall power: Morris Louis’s “Unfurled” series at warp speed, unsettled and unfixed. Conservative? Sure. Also very satisfying.

Those seeking genuine Color Field work could venture one floor below Gogo in the Pedder Building, where Pearl Lam Galleries had on view attractive, atmospheric paintings made by the New Yorker Cynthia Polsky between 1963 and 1974 using Chinese ink brushes and sponges. Informed by her travels in Asia, these drippy, speckled, and generally bright all-over abstractions suggest hazy visions of distant nebulae or rough translations of hallucinogenic visions. Many dazzle at first glance, but then betray a disconcerting formlessness as you spend time with them. They are trying to do just a bit too much.

The most potent show of painterly force came not from a gallery but from an art advisory: Art Intelligence Global marshaled a bunch of heavyweight Gerhard Richter “Abstrakte Bilder” in a single gallery within one of the towers that line Wong Chuk Hang Road on Hong Kong Island’s south side. There were a couple certifiable classics by the Meister here, the chief one being a beguiling 8½-foot-tall example from 1990 with blues and reds smoldering through a scraped field of icy gray—a koan-like exegesis on the role of chance in determining what is seen and what is obscured. Some fraction of the pleasure came from the severity of it all: black-suited security guards, dramatic lighting, the sense of walking into an anonymous vault stocked with high-value assets.

After inhabiting such hypoxia-inducing environs, a little warmth, some evidence of human presence, is called for. Mercifully, the South Korean artist Kimsooja is an expert in such matters, and had an airy solo show a few blocks away at Axel Vervoordt, “Topography of Body.” It had just eight pieces, created through simple movements, like tiny clay spheres arrayed in a circle on a pedestal, and Korean rice paper that had been crumbled and then smoothed, its surface covered with craggy lines from the pressure. The main attraction was an 18-minute video, Thread Routes–Chapter III (2012), that intercuts sequences of intricate architecture in India, like the Sun Temple of Modhera, with artisans doing meticulous work: sewing, weaving, block printing, and more. In a neighboring room, Kimsooja displayed an installation from 2012–15, comprising cotton sheets used by block printers to cover their tables thin, slightly tattered, and stained with indigo—hanging from twine. What saved all this from becoming too precious (or Pottery Barn bland) was the reverence with which the artist treated her raw materials. Presenting these work surfaces just as they are, unaltered, she mounted a tender paean to the possibilities that result from joining skill and repetition.

Over at De Sarthe, the art stared back. Beijing-based Wang Jiajia printed tall glowing, glowering pairs of eyes on canvas and surrounded them with swirling waves of paint. A news release for the solo show (titled “A/S/L,” after the archaic chatroom introduction meaning “age, sex, location”) cleverly compared these menacing cartoon eyes to those of the final bosses that loom at the conclusion of video games. They are goofy, mildly endearing pictures, teasing fears about the identities and agendas that loom behind screens—and contemporary artworks. If they are also repetitive and one-note, well, so are most online (and art) experiences.

Over in nearby Aberdeen, at one of Kiang Malingue’s spaces, Guangzhou’s Liu Yin exhibited paintings that give Shōjo manga–like faces to pink roses, juicy pears, and (why not?) a gargantuan skull that sits on grass and winks at the viewer as butterfly-fairy hybrids flutter about. (The show’s title: “Spring.”) The cuteness level is off the charts in these charismatic pictures, which range from watercolors smaller than a sheet of paper to canvases almost 7 feet across. In one, a group of flowers has tears in their eyes; another has a pair sharing a passionate kiss. Liu hijacks kawaii tropes and lays bare how easily they can manipulate, even though (or because) these characters are generic and impossible to differentiate. Seductive artworks about seduction, they have their cake as they eat it. Liu also has a talent for slipping bizarre notes into otherwise benign scenes: one work contains a bunch of cyclopic bananas; cute for a minute, they’re likely to reappear in nightmares.

More discomfort was in store at Empty Gallery’s Aberdeen branch where new wall works by Tishan Hsu smashed bodies into digital space. Their inkjet-printed patterned surfaces teem with additional sculptural elements, such as unplaceable orifices and the odd body part, including at least one glaring eye. A rare sculpture from the New York–based artist took the form of a futuristic life-size hospital bed on top of which silicone molds resembling hunks of a person—a pale blue face, expanses of sticky looking tan skin—appear to be awaiting implantation. Surveillance-style images are embedded in some of Hsu’s pieces, like the 2023 pareidolia-conjuring screen-body-data, which sports a black-and-white still of footage from CCTV. It shows a man in a balaclava standing in an empty room and doing something on his phone—a slice of raw reality intruding into the artist’s harsh, unreal world.

While Liu toys with the coercive power of popular culture, Wang and Hsu channel the dark truth that someone or something is always watching these days, whether on social media or within a bureaucracy, and threatening to act. In Hong Kong the week of the fair, a theatrical run of the slasher flick Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) was canceled under hazy circumstances (the adorable bear has been used as a caricature of Chinese president Xi Jinping, and censored in the mainland in the past), and the Sogo department store removed a video by Angeleno Patrick Amadon from a digital-art program running on its LED billboard after the artist revealed that it included information about pro-democracy activists jailed in Hong Kong.

It can be risky for dealers and artists to address anything remotely controversial when a fair is on—it is a time for selling, not activism—and a brutal political crackdown hardly helps matters, yet there were a handful of exhibitions engaging the difficult present.

In the tony H Queen’s tower, at David Zwirner, Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija installed the kind of well-outfitted umbrella repair store that was once common in Hong Kong. Visitors walked through it to enter the rest of his exhibition (titled “The Shop”), which housed 3D printers manufacturing red sculptures of broken umbrellas and robot vacuum cleaners that cruised wall-to-wall black carpeting, tracing Chinese characters. An accompanying text explained that these various components referred to novelist Liu Cixin’s sci-fi trilogy “Three-Body Problem,” but it was also tempting to read the show in the context of Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement, when protesters fighting for universal suffrage used umbrellas as shields against pepper spray and surveillance. In Tiravanija’s realm, nonfunctional umbrellas are being memorialized as machines try to maintain order and cleanliness; every single person walking through thwarts their efforts.

Meanwhile, at Blindspot Gallery, on the 15th floor of a Wong Chuk Hang Road warehouse, the Beijing filmmaker Wang Tuowas showing The Second Interrogation (also the name of his one-man exhibition), an elegant and incisive two-part video production that pits an artist and a censor against each other in a public forum and a private tête-à-tête. The two debate how artists should operate amid authoritarianism and why democracy has never taken hold in China. As their talks progress, they appear to switch positions. Wang trained as a painter, and he also hung vivid portraits of artists, musicians, and writers in China—a network operating outside or underneath the system. Some read books, one sings into a microphone. He titled the series “Weapons,” implying that the way one chooses to live can be a means of fomenting change or defending oneself.

A similar punk commitment was evident in scattered places around town all week. The magic of viewing art here is that marginal spaces still somehow endure amid extreme wealth. “Hong Kong is very small, isn’t it?” as Kitty Fane tells her about-to-be-ex-lover (with a dash of menace) in Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil (1925). And so you can be at the latest luxury mall one moment, and after a brief MTR ride, find yourself at the alternative space Current Plans, above a café in Sham Shui Po, where wig artist Tomihiro Kono and photographer Sayaka Maruyama, both Japanese, teamed up for a multifarious show centered on Kono’s outrageous avant-garde wigs, which suggest alien life-forms. Or you might stroll to the commercial Property Holdings Development Group, in a disused rooftop clubhouse high in the sky, and find Hong Konger Michele Chu’s “You, Trickling,” an experiential show about the traces that people leave behind, with heaters at the entrance, an invitation to hold incense, and emotionally loaded sculptures. One that would make Joseph Cornell proud involved a wooden drawer from the home of Chu’s family filled with salt, her fingernails, and cigarette butts, like the remains of an occult ritual.

But the most heartening and vertiginously exciting material I saw while traversing the Special Administrative Region was actually in the heart of officialdom, at Tai Kwun Contemporary, the former police station renovated in 2018 by the Hong Kong Jockey Club and the local government. “Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III,”curated by Inti Guerrero and Chantal Wong, articulated a vast universe of LGBTQ art from Asia and its diasporas, via more than 60 artists spanning almost a century, some of it coming from collector Patrick Sun’s Sunpride Foundation. Among the highlights were a luscious 1941 drawing by the Filipino American Alfonso Ossorio of a nearly nude Job, resplendent and attractive despite the sores consuming his body, and alluring 2018 prints by siren eun young jung that collage images she acquired while researching yeoseong gukgeuk, a theatrical form in her native South Korea that emerged in the mid-1940s as a protest against the patriarchy of the country’s theater world. The show has already made stops in Bangkok and Taipei, and if no one brings it Stateside, it will be a shame.

Again and again, with humor, and mischief, and invention, the artists in “Myth Makers” make and remake history, cultural tropes, and even the Bible (who knew Job could be hot?). In an unforgettable little painting from 1962, Self-Portrait with Friends, Patrick Ng Kah Onn depicts a rollicking party in Kuala Lumpur. It is a kaleidoscope of colors and patterns, as five people in ultra-chic outfits dance. The scene is—returning to the poet Huang—“embroiled in a sea of music and song.”

Videos by Andrew Norman Wilson and Stephanie Comilang took up this last subject. Wilson’s well-known Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011) concerns Google’s ScanOps workers, who digitize publications for Google Books but are not given the rights and benefits that other Google workers receive. In the exhibition, the video was accompanied by several works from Wilson’s “ScanOps” series (2012–), which comprises prints of Google Books scans in which workers’ hands or fingers can be seen, their usually hidden labor exposed. Comilang’s docufiction Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise, 2016) attends to the workforce of nearly 400,000 migrant domestic laborers in Hong Kong, who have limited financial and legal rights. Following several Filipina women as they carry out their isolating jobs and embark on social activities on their Sundays off, the video uses smartphone transmissions and telepathic communication as metaphors—strong connections, weak signals—to explore how the demands of capitalism erode collectivity.

The common assumption that artists represent a privileged category of workers informs the dynamic between subject and creator in both videos, with Wilson and Comilang negotiating a sense of distance between the workers they film and themselves. But understanding artists in the same terms as other workers can create possibilities for solidarity. A large wall-mounted time line charted the progress of Luke Ching Chin-Wai’s Chair Movement, a long-term project in which—through efforts ranging from calls and letters to government officials to graphic zines to advertisements on public buses—the artist has advocated for better working conditions, particularly access to seating, for low-wage workers like supermarket cashiers, library security guards, and gallery attendants. Lantian Xie’s Home-delivery motorcycle parked outside (2019) is a conceptual gesture meant to generate solidarity between the artist and the gallery workers. Described as a “daily choreography . . . involving staff members of Para Site and a different courier every day,” the work simply provides money—presumably from the exhibition budget—for the workers to order food delivery daily.

Perhaps the most urgent contribution to the show was the multifaceted installation by Hong Kong Artists Union, a collective formed in 2016 to advocate for the rights of artists in Hong Kong. A display of photographs and drawings and a small library formed part of the installation, as did stickers and buttons bearing slogans such as i work, u pay, which were offered to visitors, donation optional. A virtual reality piece in the installation explicitly linked the precarity of cultural labor to the enormous antigovernment protests that have recently overtaken Hong Kong in response to a proposed bill (withdrawn as of press time) that would allow Hong Kong citizens to be extradited to mainland China for trial. The piece placed viewers on a multilane road in Hong Kong’s central business district, where a smattering of people gradually begin to gather: the slow start of what might become a major protest action.

Collectivity is a process rather than an end point, and “doing the work” can sometimes feel like standing around, waiting for everyone else to show up. But collectivity is necessary—as Hong Kong Artists Union has made clear, not only by organizing artists to advocate for themselves but by bringing the struggles of Hong Kong’s residents into the exhibition space. “Bicycle Thieves” took labor, artistic or otherwise, as a vector for thinking through sometimes contradictory demands of autonomy and collectivity.

This article appears under the title “Bicycle Thieves” in the October 2019 issue, p. 97.

For some time now, our relationship with the built environment has preoccupied Wang, who was associated with China’s much-mythologized Post-Sense Sensibility movement of the late 1990s. While carrying out other important objectives—like countering blatant pandering to Western aesthetics and critiquing the oppressive Chinese government—the movement’s artists sought to comment on the lack of alternative exhibition spaces by showing work in unconventional venues. For the 1999 group show “Post-Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies and Delusion,” curated by artist Qiu Zhijie and held in the basement of a residential building in Beijing, Wang lined the floor of a narrow hallway with a series of light boxes, inviting visitors to step onto photographic images of men and women submerged underwater (1/30 Sec. Underwater, 1999). More recently, for an institutional overview of the art movement, curated by Ullens Center director Philip Tinari and hosted by Hong Kong’s Duddell’s art bar last year, Wang installed a tiled mosaic based on the aquatic portion of the Beijing Zoo in the venue’s glitzy dining hall.

Rather than making overt claims relating to politics, or even aesthetics, Wang employs subtler tactics more akin to the transformative techniques of the readymade. He forces us to consider both the types of environments he highlights (e.g., “the zoo”) and the specific contexts in which he places his transmuted versions of them. Philosopher Jacques Rancière describes mimicry as a tool that can “redistribute the sensible.” According to this view, Wang’s displacement of forms from the visible world allows his subjects to transgress their original function, and it is this dislocation that breeds critical reflection.

Recently renovated, the Edouard Malingue Gallery now has exposed steel beams and riveting, revealing the physical workings of the would-be white cube. These structural details make Wang’s inquiry into constructed environments all the more pronounced. In his show, the type of murals created to establish a comfortable illusion for humans observing animals in captivity ended up enclosing humans wishing to observe art. At times, the expansive works made the viewer experience feelings of freedom. At others, the haphazardly placed screws and blotchy, painterly strokes in the imagery underscored the artificial quality of the environment. Drawing parallels between the zoo and art, the installation left visitors with the uncanny sense that they might be confined by their own illusions.

THE BASIC UNIT OF THOUGHT in Hong Kong, my Chinese friends joke, is dollars per square foot. Not so funny if you’re an artist trying to find adequate space to live and work—or wanting to address something other than a collector’s likely financial return on your work. Lee Kit literalized this dilemma at Art Basel in 2011 with How to set up an apartment for Johnny?, an installation that mocked the idealized “model living quarters” often used to sell residential space still under construction. Filling a modest area not with high-end sofas and tables but with the cheap furnishings that new graduates and young families typically resort to, he offered to sell the components at the same priced-by-size rate as high-rise Hong Kong real estate.

Lee, who is known for hand-painted fabrics and arrays of altered everyday objects like those included in “The Ungovernables,” the 2012 triennial at the New Museum in New York, won the Art Futures Prize at Hong Kong’s Art HK fair last May. At 34, he is part of a new generation of Hong Kong artists who have set themselves in contradistinction to what many see as the grandiose work of mainland Chinese artists. Yet even his pointedly humble work—a lacquered ball of used towels is typical— cannot escape the economic logic of today’s art world. In June, the artist (whose work was also included in “Print/ Out” at New York’s MoMA this year) moved to Taipei, telling the Wall Street Journal that “the cost of the Taipei studio and plane ticket [to Hong Kong once a month] is still lower than the rent of my Hong Kong studio.”

Neither Lee’s embrace of the “unmonumental” nor his cost-benefit analysis is unique. Indeed, he and his Hong Kong colleagues might be seen as prime exemplars of a crisis faced by all experimental artists today. Forced to rely almost exclusively on selling work to wealthy collectors, they are caught up in a global system serving—and ultimately controlled by—one percent of the one percent.1 Nowhere is this peculiar fact more striking than in China’s Special Administrative Region on Victoria Bay, where a population of just seven million boasts 83,600 high-net-worth individuals—those having at least one million dollars of readily investable assets, apart from the value of their residences, collectibles and consumer items.

Accordingly, over the past two years, the art press has buzzed with news of Hong Kong’s rise as a contemporary art-selling powerhouse, bidding to lead the field in Asia. Longtime Hong Kong galleries like Hanart TZ, 10 Chan- cery Lane, Osage, and Tang Contemporary have recently been joined by big-name Western firms such as Gagosian, Ben Brown, Galerie Perrotin, Simon Lee and White Cube. Shanghai socialite-dealer Pearl Lam, a Hong Kong native, has returned with a rambling branch venue, which in July showed Hong Kong installation artist Tsang Kin-Wah. Christie’s and Sotheby’s have both opened elegant facili- ties to compete with Asian auction houses already doing a roaring business. The annual Art HK fair, the most successful in Asia, will transform in its sixth iteration next spring into Art Basel Hong Kong, making it—after Miami—the third component of the Art Basel empire.

On the nonprofit front, the international Asia Society opened its privately funded Hong Kong Center this year with an exhibition featuring historical Asian works from the Rockefeller Collection interspersed with contemporary pieces by artists such as Montien Boonma, Mariko Mori and Michael Joo. M+, the long-awaited contemporary art museum (part of a $2.8-billion cultural complex being constructed in Kowloon, across the harbor from Hong Kong Island) is slated to open in 2017. It is already doing off-site exhibitions and projects under the directorship of Lars Nittve, former head of London’s Tate Modern and Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, and the senior curatorship of Pi Li, a well-known Chinese art scholar, curator and for- mer partner in Beijing’s Boers-Li Gallery. Nittve describes the museum’s approach as “from a Hong Kong point of view, with a global perspective.” Recently, M+ announced the acquisition—through a partial gift and a $22.7-million payment—of 1,510 works from the premier Uli Sigg col- lection of avant-garde Chinese art.

ALL VERY THRILLING, but where does it leave Hong Kong’s artists? Last May, two days before the opening of Art HK 12 at the space-age Hong Kong Convention and Exhi- bition Center (soon peppered with T-shirts and tote bags proclaiming a “Truism” from Jenny Holzer: “Money Creates Taste”), I met with a number of artists in Fo Tan, a light- manufacturing and warehouse district in the New Territories north of Kowloon. There, at a physical and psychological remove from Hong Kong’s 1,224 skyscrapers (New York, a poor second, has just 569), some 200 emerging—or mature and hanging in there—practitioners live and work in condi- tions not unlike those that prevail in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Their stories, though diverse, have a common element of benign neglect by the city’s cultural institutions, both public and private.

Chow Chun Fai, who had his fourth Hong Kong solo at Hanart TZ in 2010, was first noted for paintings of red taxi-cabs, the sort used in his small family business, but has since concentrated on large images derived from Hong Kong films, making his canvas-crowded studio a dream factory in several senses. A young German émigré to Hong Kong by way of Tokyo, Cornelia Erdmann has since 2006 made installations throughout the city, using materials such as cut metal, LEDs, woven wire and light tubes. Lee Chin Fai (aka Danny Lee) creates huge metal egg shapes and polished-steel drips, a modernized evocation, he says, of go-with-the-flow Taoism.

Whatever their age or degree of commercial success, Fo Tan denizens give a similar account of the artistic life in Hong Kong. There is good-quality studio art training available, notably at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the newly opened branch of the Savannah College of Art and Design; there is occasional, transitory support from agencies such as the Hong Kong Arts Development Council; there are friendly art-and-labor exchanges among fellow artists, especially in Fo Tan and the comparably feisty Chai Wan district on the eastern end of Hong Kong Island (a neighborhood rife with pop-up activity during Art HK 12); there are DIY groups and open-studio parties; there is even a conscientious preservation of Hong Kong art history at the nonprofit Asia Art Archive, which also provides artist residences and, during Art HK 12, used its booth to docu- ment the short-lived (1998-2000) Oil Street artist village.

Missing, however, are adequate opportunities to exhibit in critically respected galleries, museums and alternative spaces. Most of the big-name galleries now setting up shop in Hong Kong come to promote a mix of Western art stars to Asian collectors, and mainland Chinese art to both Chinese and foreign buyers. During the Art HK 12 ferment last spring, Gagosian presented Andreas Gursky; Ben Brown, Alighiero Boetti; Galerie Perrotin, KAWS; Simon Lee, Sherrie Levine; White Cube, Anselm Kiefer. Pearl Lam Galleries offered work by seven mainland Chinese abstractionists, selected by legendary PRC curator Gao Minglu. And a few days later, the top lot at Sotheby’s contemporary Asian sale was the painting Bloodline: Big Family, No. 2 (1993) by PRC star Zhang Xiaogang, selling for $6.69 million; at Christie’s, Blue Chrysanthemums in a Glass Vase (ca. 1940-49) by Sanyu, an anodyne “modernist” painter from mainland China, who spent his adult life in France, went for $6.14 million. Commercially, for all today’s pious talk about “hybrid identity” and “borderless art,” Hong Kong artists are often deemed “not Chinese enough” to be of great interest in either the East or West.

Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Museum of Art (established 1962) is devoted primarily to cultural artifacts and historical work. Even when it mounts the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Biennial, the museum requires avant-garde artists to share the exhibition space with contemporary ink painters, calligraphers and seal carvers—an official version of cultural balance.

The nonprofit Para/Site Art Space, conversely, has been a bastion of experimentation since its founding in 1996, but it is a tiny bastion indeed, occupying only 1,600 square feet in a former city-center storefront. The Cattle Depot Artist Village (founded 2001)—previously a slaugh- terhouse, located in a hard-to-reach Kowloon locale—is perpetually too short of funds to do justice to its some- times bold programming, such as the May 2012 show of works about WWII comfort women by Korean-born, New York-based Chang Jin Lee. (And where else on Chinese soil could one, in 2009, have seen an exhibition commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre?) Overall, the dearth of good venues drives many Hong Kong artists to exhibit in shopping malls, parks and corporate lobbies—a common, non-stigmatized practice in Asia but one nevertheless far from ideal and of little financial benefit to the struggling artists.

One response to this situation has been graffiti art, executed most famously by the trash collector and guerrilla calligrapher Tsang Tsou Choi (1921-2007), the self-styled “King of Kowloon.” In the semicommercial Kowloon neighborhood of Kwun Tong, I encountered a more up-to- date version of tagging, as practiced by figures such as Lam Lung, a former tattoo artist who depicts patterned faces; “Dom,” who visually bombards walls, sidewalks and door- ways under the rubric Start from Zero (“START stands for STreet ART, STencil ART and STicker ART”); and Tang Chin (aka “Tangerine”), who spray-painted countless surfaces with a familiar bearded visage and the words “Who’s afraid of Ai Weiwei?” during the artist’s mysterious detention in Beijing last year.

Interestingly, Who’s Afraid of Hong Kong Artists? is the name of a local movement started a few years ago in reaction to the Art HK fair, seen by group members as inhospitable to the city’s own art-makers. Those sentiments, like the Kwun Tong neighborhood, are shared by Graphicairlines, an art-and-design team begun by “Tat and Vi” in 2002. Though they champion street art and an “aesthetics of ugly,” the pair often turn out handsomely designed items such as the authentic-looking Graphic-airlines boarding pass they handed me: “Creative Class,” it reads against a dark background of constellations and planets, “Flight No. 852, From nowhere to everywhere . . . You never know what comes after.”

RECOGNITION FOR HONG KONG artists is not entirely lacking, of course. The long-established galleries, particularly Hanart TZ, make an effort to include local artists in their programming from time to time. The city has, moreover, its own pavilion at the Venice Biennale—separate from mainland China’s, much more pleasant and niftily located across from the Arsenale entrance/exit. In 2009, Pak Sheung Chuen presented domestic-object installations and performance videos that highlight the paradoxical “smallness” of Hong Kong. Waiting for a Friend (without appointment), 2006, finds the artist repeatedly hanging around transportation hubs until someone he knows happens by. Breathing in a House (2006) portrays him inflating large plastic bags with his breath until they pile up and take over his entire apartment. In 2011, the Venice space was overwhelmed by the immersive, psychedelic environment of “Frog King” Kwok Mang-Ho, who often lurked about the pavilion in a wild costume and concentric-circle eyeglasses. The 2013 representative will be Lee Kit.

Three Hong Kong artists were included in the “CAFAM Future” exhibition last summer at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum in Beijing, a roundup of 95 Chinese artists under the age of 35, nominated by a blue-ribbon panel of international curators, artists and critics. Besides the ubiquitous Lee Kit, the organizers chose Au Hoi Lam, a Fo Tan district regular who also showed her work (delicate, sometimes text-based draw- ings and paintings on linen, board or handkerchief ) in Osage Gallery’s booth at Art HK 12; and Ho Sin Tung, whose pencil drawings evoke imaginary films. Cordelia and Christoph Noe, Beijing-based independent curators and authors, recently edited Hong Kong Artists: 20 Portraits (2012), comprising essays and profiles written by themselves and 18 other contributors. Philip Tinari, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, presents Nadim Abbas, an artist and musician whose Ornament & Crime (2008)—a characteristically brainy and elaborate installation—juxtaposes a PVC pipe structure, into which viewers can drop porcelain objects to be spewed out and broken on the floor, with an array of images depicting various human execution devices. Award-winning critic Pauline J. Yao, based in Beijing and Hong Kong, profiles two artists: Wong Wai Yin, who explores replication, deception and copying in both pictures and texts; and Adrian Wong, a Chinese-American émigré known for performance-installations such as Sang Yat Fai Lok (Happy Birthday), 2008, a re-creation of his great uncle’s once immensely popular kids’ TV show from the 1960s and ’70s, “Calvin’s Corner.” Abby Chen, curator and deputy director of the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, discusses Fo Tan artist Lam Tung-Pang, whose Selling My Soul (2010)—in which the artist erased his own drawings at the Tate Modern in London—she regards as haunted by the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from the UK to China.

This sense of between-ness has long infused progres- sive Hong Kong art. Witness Ho Siu-Kee’s Walking on Two Balls (1995), one of the most memorable works in Gao Minglu’s landmark “Inside Out” exhibition, which introduced contemporary Chinese art to many Western viewers during its international tour in 1998-2000. The video shows the Hong Kong artist desperately trying to keep his balance and move forward while standing on a pair of large wooden spheres.

CHEN TAKES A POSITIVE VIEW of the cultural divide, at least for now. She holds that progressive Hong Kong artists, because they get some support from the Hong Kong government and private foundations, produce work which is “less commercial and more diverse” than that of their mainland Chinese peers, who receive almost no public funding. But she has misgivings about the future, as mainland influence grows: “We might get to witness the most intense reawakening of a society, but also the last orgy of freedom for the individual.”2

The recent travails of Ai Weiwei suggest that this is no mere alarmist hyperbole. Thanks to 155 years of stable and relatively enlightened British rule, Hong Kong was spared the bitter history of modern China (briefly: revolution, civil war, foreign invasions, Communist autocracy, forced collectivization, mass starvation, global isolation, internal persecutions and, since 1978, conversion to crony capitalism under a one-party oligarchy). Some critics even allege that Hong Kong artists have had too much ease to generate truly significant art. But with the advent of Chinese authority in 1997, their hometown—a phenomenally successful world port and financial center—is now in a more tenuous posi- tion, especially given the possible expiration in 2047 of the Basic Law protecting its free marketplace and civil rights.

During Art HK 12, rumors ran rampant that mainland officials, wised-up to phony valuation numbers and routine tax evasion, were demanding shipping lists from the Hong Kong auction houses, and that dealers might be next. After several weeks, things calmed down and only a few people—a couple of German shipping company employees and, oh, a top Minsheng Bank official—were arrested in Beijing. People soon shrugged the incident off, as they often do in China, as just another instance of governmental muscle-flexing, or “killing the chicken to scare the monkey.” Will the day come when they take a similar view toward cracking down on artists in order to bring more political types into line?

Such concerns seem far away as one glides through the sleek corridors of Hong Kong’s swank new galleries and auction houses—as they once did, I suppose, in 18th-century Versailles. But let’s hope the city (perhaps prodded a bit by its overlooked bohemians) will somehow mature, while the clock ticks over the next 35 years, to be more than just a business-savvy, vacation-comfy boomtown where the rich come to luxuriate in contemporary art that only they can afford.

1 This phrase, though catchy, probably understates the gap. There are roughly seven billion people on earth at present. Are 700,000 of them serious collectors of contemporary art? If so, where are they hiding?

2 All Abby Chen quotes from an e-mail to the author, Oct. 2, 2012.

“See way over there, where those high-rises are? That was the East Village once. Basically a dump.”1 Photographer Xing Danwen (pronounced shing dahn-wen) gestured toward the new urban vista that spread beyond the window of the second-floor coffee shop of the Westin hotel in Beijing’s northeastern Chaoyang district. Now home to the relocated Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) as well as the 798 and Caochangdi gallery districts, the area is, as she went on to say, “all changed now”—a phrase that could serve as a veritable mantra for post-Mao China, for its avant-garde art scene and for her own transformed career.

Earlier that day last August, we had joked together over some of Xing’s recent publicity—“how can China Vogue make me look so bad, in an ugly dress?”—while discussing the stages of her evolution from bohemian documentarian to deliberate, soulful orchestrator of straight photographic images to author of deftly fabricated digital tableaux and animations. That artistic journey, from reportage to ever greater artifice and personal control, reflects the development of Chinese art photography in general since the late 1970s. And it has taken Xing, in roughly 15 years, from the edge of the East Village “dump,” where many of China’s most daring young artists once struggled to survive, to a two-story apartment in one of the city’s elite residential towers, a refuge in which she now creates much of her work and administers a nonstop international exhibition schedule.

To date, the 42-year-old Xing has been known, both within China and abroad, primarily for the images she made during and after her 1998-2001 MFA stint at the School of Visual Arts in New York. These works are nearly all, in various ways, concerned with the profound sense of dislocation now felt in China, with its recent history of sudden, titanic socio-political shifts—from a 2,000-year-old empire to a fledgling republic (1911) to Communist dictatorship (1949) to one-party state capitalism (1978).

Xing’s first widely exhibited works, shot exclusively in black and white, are elegiac meditations on lost worlds and broken ties. Scroll (1999-2000) consists of two long horizontal strips of moody, deliberately blurred images from Beijing—widely separated swimmers, nearly empty streets, people sitting forlornly on park benches—all conjoined, jerky film-strip fashion, in stark contrast to the natural flow of traditional scroll paintings. The slide-show installation Sleepwalking (2000), similarly disjunctive, features stills from New York fading in and out of each other to a mix of old Chinese and new electronic music.

Xing’s shift from nostalgia to a more vivid social critique occurred hand in hand with her adoption of color. The “disCONNEXION” series (2002-03) is composed of disconcertingly gorgeous close-ups of electronic waste: mounds of circuit boards, plastic cords and computer housings, rendered with sharp allover focus and luscious chromatic saturation. Although the images reflect the mass dumping of high-tech refuse from Japan, Korea and the U.S. in southern China (where many of the devices were originally manufactured using low-wage labor), the sense of ecological and economic protest is balanced by the sheer formal beauty of the large-format shots, their “found” compositions exhibiting a kind of Ab-Ex sublimity.

An eerie quality entered Xing’s work with the “Duplication” series (2003), each shot depicting a pile of sorted doll parts: Caucasian adult male heads, bald baby heads, detached infant arms, female heads with wildly spread pale blond hair. These images, which for Westerners might evoke the Holocaust, could very well suggest other associations to Chinese viewers cognizant of their country’s grim history of street decapitations and female infanticide. Mercifully, a vestige of the playful aura of toys clings to the dismembered dolls, giving the pictures a surrealistic tinge, rather than a strictly macabre air. The shots serve, Xing says, as a mordant comment on the dehumanizing effect of tailoring oneself to preconceived social roles.

During travels in Europe, the artist was struck by the worldwide uniformity of contemporary city architecture, especially high-rise residential blocks. Her somewhat Laurie Simmons-like response was “Urban Fiction” (2004-08), in which stylishly dressed “live” characters are digitally inserted into architectural models of luxury apartment buildings. (Real-estate offices in China are studded with elaborate scale mock-ups, and units are often sold long before the structures are complete.) The domestic scenes played out by the “residents” (many of them Xing herself in diverse guises) range from the mundane (sunbathing) to the melodramatic (murder), and suggest that the foibles of the human heart cannot be fundamentally altered by China’s recent upscale housing frenzy—contrary to promotional materials that, in a bizarre twist on both ancient spiritualism and Mao-era utopian propaganda, rhapsodically describe high-rise residency as a new, more elevated state of being. On the contrary, as art historian Madeline Eschenburg has pointed out, living in self-enclosed, vertically stacked spaces, singly or with only a spouse and one child, is profoundly disorienting to many Chinese city dwellers accustomed to life in horizontal courtyard buildings and hutongs, long-lane complexes shared with extended family members and intimate neighbors spanning two or three generations.2

This concern with isolation and lost identity is paramount in “Wall House” (2007), which resulted from Xing’s artist residency in the high-concept Wall House designed by U.S.-based experimental architect John Hejduk (1929-2000). Constructed in Groningen, the Netherlands, the dwelling is bisected by a solid, freestanding wall that separates work areas from living spaces. In addition, the residential components are layered in such a way that one can move from one room to another only via a stairs next to the wall. Thus every change of activity requires a change of location: inhabitants are forced to think about their every function throughout the course of the day.

Xing commemorated her time in Hejduk’s stark interior in digitally manipulated photographs and video pervaded by signs of loneliness and uncertainty. Views through the windows show not Groningen but Beijing. In one shot, the artist perches alone on a couch, wearing a pale blue synthetic wig. In another, she sits, back to the viewer, in a simple chair, facing a small picture window that reveals an eight-lane Beijing expressway clogged with traffic; a cell phone sits forlornly on a table in the foreground. Perhaps the most telling image in the series presents a partially clad woman gazing into a bathroom mirror, where she sees “herself” fully dressed and wearing the incongruous blue wig. And a bedroom shot provides the environment for an animated projection of a young woman who rises from the edge of the bed and wafts about an interior space seemingly more real than herself.

These studies in alienation have earned Xing exposure in many international galleries as well as major institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Whitney Museum, New York; the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark; the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; and the National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Seoul. Yet the pictures’ anomie, like the wanderings that engendered them, is far from the cultural rootedness in which Xing began and the artistic communality in which she originally thrived.

Perhaps that is why the artist has now decided to exhibit her earlier, Nan Goldin-style images that record China’s 1990s underground arts ferment—first in a solo show (focusing on Beijing’s famous East Village performance art scene) that opens this month at Haines Gallery in San Francisco and, later, in an exhibition and book titled Xing Danwen: A Personal Diary—China’s Avant-Garde in the 1990s (covering experimental film, theater, rock ’n’ roll and dance, as well as the visual arts) to be launched at Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, in spring 2011.

Xing was born in the provincial city of Xi’an during the second year of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). In the spirit of the times, her parents (both engineers at a state energy company) gave her a personal name, Danwen, that she says translates as Red Culture. Growing up near the tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi (259-210 b.c.)—with its famed terra-cotta army [see A.i.A., Mar. ’09], discovered in 1974, when Xing was seven—did not inspire a love of ancient artifacts and tradition in the future artist. In fact, she came to feel strongly that “we must make our own history now,” a sentiment common at the time of Mao’s concerted push to eliminate the “four olds” (old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas), though Xing would eventually give the directive an avant-garde spin that the Great Helmsman would not have welcomed.

Xing studied oil painting (aka Western painting) at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, graduating in 1992. There, as in Xi’an, instructors encouraged students to go out with sketchbook or camera to document the noble “hard life” experienced by workers, peasants and soldiers—still considered, a decade or more after the death of Mao, suitable subjects for carefully elaborated studio paintings.

The young Xing elected to travel alone to remote regions, seeking to capture images of coal miners, Tibetan villagers and other members of China’s 56 ethnic minorities. Her biggest fear, she admits, was rape. Schoolmates urged her to master kung fu or to carry a knife. “But I was not a large girl,” she says. “I knew that any man who wanted to could turn my own knife against me. So I decided to take condoms instead.” Fortunately, the precaution proved to be unnecessary. “The people were unsophisticated, even crude by city standards,” she recalls, “but also tremendously welcoming and sweet.”

Xing obtained her first camera—purchased secondhand, by a friend, at a street market in Hong Kong—in the spring of 1989. Immediately, like most of her CAFA colleagues, she was caught up in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests. Yet the pictures she managed to take, she considers worthless. “I didn’t even know how to load the camera properly. My first roll of film came out blank.” Her subsequent shots have been packed away, unseen, for 20 years. “Maybe,” she muses, “I should dig those boxes out and take another look sometime.”

After her graduation, Xing (who did not have a Beijing residency authorization) was obliged to return to Xi’an and begin work in a government agency issuing arts-and-entertainment permits. As always, her official file—a school and employment record, supplemented by character assessments from state authorities—preceded her unseen, a procedure known to every educated Chinese citizen. The bureaucratic assignment in Xi’an, in return for the “free” college education Xing had received, was slated to last five years. “I knew I would go mad,” she says, “if I had to spend every morning in an office, drinking tea and reading the paper—the usual government clerk way—and every afternoon stamping application forms.” Instead, she struck a deal with her supervisors. Her name remained on record as an employee, but she departed, a free woman, for illegal residency in the capital—while the Xi’an “office” kept her salary.

The following year (1993), Xing married a German engineer who worked for Lufthansa Airlines in Beijing. During a three-month stay in Germany, she shopped her work around, selling four paintings and securing her first solo photography exhibition (at Gallery Grauwert, Hamburg, 1994) as well as the first publication of her images (a cover story in the Hamburg-based, black-and-white arts weekly Photo News). In addition, she won freelance commissions from such large-circulation German magazines as Stern and Geo. (Her initial assignment for the latter, a 12-page photo-and-text account of young people training for the Beijing Opera, enabled Xing to buy her first new camera.)

Before this time, Xing had, she says, no notion that photography could be construed as high art. She had been raised first on propaganda imagery, then on workaday photojournalism. Her schools had a half dozen serious photo books but no art photography courses. It was only in the early 1990s, when she was around 26 years old, that three encounters drastically altered her view: a Henri Cartier-Bresson show at China’s National Art Museum, a Sebastião Salgado display at the World Photo Press Exhibition in Beijing and a book featuring the photographs of Wolfgang Tillmans. The Tillmans volume, with its casual-seeming shots of youth and drug cultures, finally galvanized her: “If his pictures could be art,” she says now, “maybe mine could be, too.”

At the time, Xing and her husband were living in a Beijing apartment building near the East Village. The name of the enclave, where young artists shared cheap space with farmers and migrant workers near a large garbage heap, was an homage to New York’s bohemian mecca of the 1970s and ’80s, but its history was uniquely Chinese.

In the course of the Cultural Revolution, universities and art academies had been closed, and many professors, students and “privileged” urban youths were sent to provincial factories and rural agricultural communes to be “reeducated” by the people. After the Chairman’s death in 1976, the academies reopened and vanguard art emerged with increasing force throughout the 1980s, aided by the Open Door policy of Deng Xiaoping, who allowed a massive influx of outside information and initiated market-based reforms that swiftly transfigured China. Mounting artistic experimentation, sometimes referred to as the ’85 New Wave [see A.i.A., Apr. ’08], culminated at the National Art Museum in February 1989 with “China/Avant-Garde,” a summa exhibition encompassing 186 artists and 293 works. The show’s subtitle and theme, “No U Turn,” proved ironic. Two hours after the exhibition opened, the artist Xiao Lu fired two pistol shots at her own installation, prompting security forces to close the show. (Xiao was jailed, along with her boyfriend and accomplice, Tang Song, but released three days later thanks to high-level family contacts.)

“China/Avant-Garde” then reopened, only to close again due to bomb threats (probably faked by another artist, Liu Anping). Coming just four months before the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Xiao Lu incident marked a severe rupture between recently invigorated experimental artists and the once relatively tolerant new government. After Deng sent troops into Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, many experimental artists scattered and went into seclusion, remaining underground for several years.

They re-emerged gradually in the early 1990s, clustering here and there in “artist villages,” the two most famous of which were in Beijing. Yuanmingyuan, on the west side near the emperor’s Old Summer Palace, was favored by painters such as the now celebrated Fang Lijun, Yang Shaobin and Yue Minjun. The East Village, in contrast, drew radical performance artists. It flourished for only about two years (1992-94), with a core group of roughly 20-30, counting artists and event-participant friends. (Intermittent activity by former residents continued here and there for a few more years; the area itself was razed in 2001 to make way for a park.) Setting the tone, three of the most experimental residents—Zhang Huan [see A.i.A., Dec. ’07], Zhu Ming and Ma Liuming—specialized in nude performance, a fact which in the spring of 1994 caught the unwelcome attention of the police.

At the time, Xing—like Rong Rong, the best-known chronicler of the East Village milieu3—was photographing her artist friends almost daily. She also brought occasional Western visitors to share the events and bohemian ambience. The Village performers welcomed sympathetic observers, especially photographers and video-makers, as potential disseminators of their work. Indeed, it is evident in a number of Xing’s images that artistic actions were undertaken expressly for a few cronies and a multitude of lenses.

Xing, simultaneously one of the gang and a nonresident outsider, was once confronted by the influential art photographer Liu Zheng, who angrily accused her of “lacking seriousness.” Xing protested that she could not spend hours “sitting around with the boys, drinking and talking philosophy”; she was much too busy doing something virtually unprecedented in China—establishing herself as a woman artist in her own right, while concurrently maintaining a freelance photojournalistic career and a stable home life as a foreigner’s wife and social partner.

Just how “serious” that triple undertaking could be soon became evident, when local villagers—and then government authorities—reacted with alarm to a series of nude performances in the spring of 1994. In May, according to at least one illustrated account, Zhu Ming—a frail, fatherless, self-taught 22-year-old artist from Mao’s native province of Hunan—went to a nearby area (Xing was not in attendance), stripped naked and had himself buried alive for two hours, breathing and blowing bubbles through a tube. A few hours later, he lay covered with suds in a shallow “grave” near a cemetery.4

In early June, Zhang Huan—whose fall 1993 performance on the steps of the National Art Museum had caused the preemptive closing of a student exhibition there—stirred the East Village with his now legendary public latrine piece, 12 Square Meters (the size of the sweltering space in which he sat for an hour covered with fish oil and honey). It was followed within days by his 65 Kilograms, in which Zhang—the title refers to the 29-year-old’s body weight at the time—was suspended in chains from the ceiling of a room while three white-robed doctors extracted 250cc of his blood and dribbled it onto a hot steel pan on the floor.

The next day (June 12), a lithesome Ma Liuming, 25 and noted for his occasional appearances in drag as the beautiful Fen-Ma Liuming, invited a score of friends to join him for lunch in the walled courtyard of a farmer’s house, where the artist lived in a single rented room. With the peasant family away, Ma undressed, made himself up and set about cooking a pot of potatoes at an outdoor gas range. (The effect was not nearly as impressive as that of his earlier Fen-Ma Liuming’s Lunch I, in which he had sucked on a tube attached to his own penis.) The performance concluded with Ma boiling his watch and rings, and burying them under a tree. Afterward, eight or nine people were standing around chatting when a police squad—accompanied by a translator—burst through the courtyard door.

Xing, knowing that the film would be pulled from her camera, slipped the exposed rolls into her husband’s pockets—confident that, in keeping with cautious government policy of the moment, a foreigner would not be physically accosted or searched. Everyone was taken to the precinct station and asked repeatedly who had organized the “obscene” events in the East Village. After a few hours, all but Zhu Ming and Ma Liuming were released.

Xing delivered her pictures the next day to the Associated Press, which broke the story internationally. Several East Village artists were rousted from their quarters, and others dispersed out of caution, at least temporarily. Later Xing visited Ma Liuming in Chaoyang District Prison, bringing fruit and cooked food. These gifts turned out to be unacceptable; only cash and cigarettes could be given to the inmates. Ma, unharmed, said that he was being kept in a large common cell under the protection of the block’s lead prisoner, who had taken a liking to him. However, neither Ma nor anyone else in the East Village circle knew where Zhu was being held. (Meanwhile, on June 30, Zhang Huan was set upon and beaten by a pair of unidentified men in a bar.) Later, near the end of the two artists’ two-month detention, the curator-critic Li Xiangting, father figure to the Beijing avant-garde, found Zhu in the much less civilized Changping district lockup.

Upon their release, Zhu and Ma were taken to the train station and escorted to their provincial hometowns. Official announcements declared that a “ring of pornographers” had been broken up through deft government intervention. A month later, both artists were back in Beijing. (Zhu went on to tour internationally, often performing while encased, on land and sea, in a large plastic bubble. Ma blithely walked naked on the Great Wall and conducted a long series of nude performances in China and abroad. Zhang, after many more nude events around the world, today oversees a workshop complex in Shanghai, where some 90 assistants turn out his paintings, prints, woodcarvings and sculptures.) So the cat-and-mouse game continues, to this day, in the People’s Republic.

After the East Village arrests, Xing created a remarkably sensitive photo series depicting partially nude Chinese women of various ages (“I Am a Woman,” 1994-96). The images have never been exhibited, except for a suite of three black-and-white shots labeled “Born with the Cultural Revolution” (1995), which University of Chicago scholar-curator Wu Hung included in two exhibitions outside China.5 Those works show a pregnant young woman standing and lying in a room, apparently an everyday living space, dominated by a Chinese flag and multiple pictures of Chairman Mao.

In 1998, shortly before she left for her studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Xing was called on her mobile and asked to meet with Chinese security agents. She went to the agreed-upon hotel lobby and was immediately escorted to an upper-story room, where she was interrogated for four hours. “I dressed well, I made my own money, I hung out with crazy artists and foreigners,” she recalls. “The cops were sure I was a spy or a prostitute—maybe both.” Questioning eventually centered on her contact with a German journalist working for Der Spiegel in Beijing. “I know him, of course,” she told her quartet of inquisitors, “but not well. He never gave me any freelance work.” The agents reminded her of Chinese judicial policy: the more readily you admit your guilt, the less severe your punishment. But she had no guilt, and no more to reveal.

Before letting Xing go, the security men asked if they could take her picture. “No,” she said reflexively, then had a flash of inspiration: “I’ve just been profiled in the journal Woman’s Friend. The issue, with lots of pictures, is on the newsstands now. If you want to remember me, buy the magazine.” 

Currently On View Solo shows by Xing Danwen at Ooi Botos, Hong Kong [through Feb. 27]; Modern Chinese Art Foundation, Ghent [through Feb. 18]; and Haines Gallery, San Francisco [Feb. 18-Mar. 27].

Works by Xing Danwen will appear in the group shows “Chinese Modernism and U.S. Vernacular,” Architecture Center Houston [Mar. 12-Apr. 25];
“Seeing Utopia, Past and Future,” Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University [Mar. 31-May TK]; and “Reshaping History,” Arario Gallery, Beijing [Apr. 23-May 18]. Her solo “A Personal Diary” goes on view at the Wall Museum, Beijing [September 2010], and Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo [spring 2011].

1 All direct quotes from the artist are from conversations with the author: Beijing, Aug. 16, 2009; New York-Beijing, via telephone, Dec. 14, 2009. 

2 Madeline Eschenburg, “Xing Danwen: Revealing the Masquerade of Modernity,” Yishu, July/August 2009, pp. 51-66. 

3 See especially his deluxe portfolio of over 40 black-and-white photographs with accompanying text by Wu Hung: Rong Rong’s East Village, 1993-1998, Chicago, Art Media Resources, 2003. 

4 Thomas J. Berghuis, Performance Art in China, Hong Kong, Timezone 8, 2006, pp. 106-08. 

5 “Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century” (1999) and, with curator Christopher Phillips of New York’s International Center of Photography, “Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China” (2004). Both shows had extensive tours.