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Text of interview with Karen Smith, for Art Newspaper.

Karen Smith is a Beijing based expert on contemporary Chinese art, and has lived in Beijing since the early 1990s. Currently she splits her activities between curating exhibitions, educational programmes, and writing about Chinese art. She lives and works in a courtyard close to the Forbidden City. She is one of the few personalities in the Chinese art scene who has consistently followed her instincts in developing new work by emerging and unknown artists, while at the same time maintaining her relationships and interest in the work of China’s now more established big name artists. Her book “Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant Garde Art in New China” is now considered one of the key texts in the study of Chinese art. She will be talking at Frieze on October 16, and is also lecturing at a groundbreaking new series of education based discussions, the Asia Art Forum, which be held in Shanghai in mid-October.

Q: How do you feel about current, almost immediate events, that are affecting Chinese art, such has economic uncertainty?

Karen Smith: There has been a lot of money flowing around in the Chinese art scene over the last few years which has had a dramatic effect upon the art scene and the nature of the art being produced. That volume of funds is going to fluctuate somewhat in the coming year or so, which is not a bad thing. It might make artists reflect upon the quality of the work they are producing, and encourage some of the new galleries to formulate more productive strategies to deal with a slackening off in the market. So, hopefully these recent events will have a positive impact. After all, the best of Chinese avant-garde art was produced in the early years (late 1980s through the 1990s) in the complete absence of an art market.
It is an interesting moment to talk about the situation of China’s contemporary art world at Frieze. The market has come to occupy such a dominant position in the art world, often deciding “quality” and “importance”, most obviously in terms of Chinese art works and a local scene that does not enjoy the sobering influence of meaningful critical debate. Yet at the same time, Chinese artists are often criticised for being overly commercial, whilst their entire understanding of how the art market functions, and the value judgements it passes, is informed by their knowledge and experience of western models. Recent events have certainly encouraged me to reflect upon the impact of the market on art. Recent mainstream media reports on Chinese art have focused exclusively on auction prices. It suggests that in terms of Chinese art this is the only thing that counts, but that is only one part of the market, and ignores the work that galleries do to promote artists. Anyway, from an academic, cultural, or simply individual perspective it is the art itself that is most important, and I feel that what is presented beyond China, largely via the media, does not represent what is really going on in China, at least not what is most powerful

Q: How do you feel Chinese art is received in the UK, and “the west”?

KS: In the first decade I was in China, it was an uphill battle trying to persuade anyone outside of China that the contemporary art scene was worth looking at. Right up until almost 2002, you could bang your head silly trying to talk to people abroad about Chinese art, whilst watching their eyes glaze over. It simply wasn’t on anyone’s radar screen. Now the pendulum has swung to the opposite side. There are so many museums and galleries seeking to engage with Chinese art that there’s a danger of saturation of interest.
To give an example of the persuasive powers required to show Chinese art in the UK, we have The Real Thing that I co-curated with Simon Groom, then director of exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, in 2007. Simon had been trying to get the exhibition on the programme for many years before it became a serious proposition. And I think had he not travelled through China in the early 1990s, he might not have developed such a strong interest in pushing for the show to happen—China really requires this kind of immersion in order to begin to understand the depths of the art and the culture as it is unfolding here. Even then it seems to take someone like Saatchi to get Chinese art into the features section of the mainstream press: which means it is still more about him than about Chinese art per se.
It is partly the general lack of understanding of China that fuels misconceptions in the West about Chinese society and its art. If we look back to 1989, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, perceptions of China were then linked to the nature of change that was sweeping Europe at that time: specifically the idea that liberal democracy would triumph over communist states–in China as in Russia, it being just a matter of time. Hence the specific taste in art that was in evidence at that time on the part of western people coming to China, that being for art of a highly politicized nature which appeared as a signpost to the new “democratic” future. In supporting this “future”, people subconsciously felt they must be supporting change in China. This also dovetailed with the natural empathy expressed towards the Chinese people in the aftermath of June 4.
Since then China has changed, but perhaps not in ways that the West anticipated. Today, it is almost harder to explain China because of the absence of big power politics being visible in the art. Against China’s economic rise there are new prejudices and attitudes to contend with. But at the same time, when China joined the WTO we saw a huge increase in economic ties to the US, which prompted a wave of interest from American museums and collectors in particular, who had not shown a great deal of interest in China’s contemporary art pre-WTO. This interest mushroomed between 2004 and 2008, and we now see large groups of interested parties (including museum directors and major collectors) coming through on a regular basis. There is still a tendency to discuss the art and China in general, in black and white terms where in truth nothing in China is ever black and white. But the fact that there is a discussion is important.

Q: How do you feel about the emergence of Chinese art collectors, who have become their own critics with the lack of professional critics here?

KS: A number of these act as patrons. Their activities serve to encourage artists—one might suggest in ways that have been seen since Renaissance times. But it is not clear where this trend will take the artists. Only a few collectors, such as Guan Yi in Beijing have sound strategies and a specific vision as to what they want their collection to achieve. Is this important? That’s one of those Chinese puzzles that have yet to be solved.

Q: In your book “Nine Lives,” you picked nine artists and followed their experiences and development as artists within the changing Chinese society, the changes to the art scene here have been dramatic, are you planning some new work?

KS: This book covers the period 1985 to 1989, specifically the socio political change that created the conditions necessary for an avant-garde art to emerge. It was an exciting period but not, I think, as extraordinary as the 1990s. You can say that in the 1980s artists were inventing the tools, and in the 1990s they put them to use. What they created with those tools is the bedrock of everything you can see in the contemporary art scene in China today. That’s the subject of a new book focused on the 1990s. I am currently working on the best way to do this. It’s astonishingly hard to recapture the mood of the 1990s today. But not just for me. Many of the artists from that generation are filled with emotions of nostalgia and loss: they have been taught to look forward their entire lives but find themselves drawn to the past because it is vanishing before their eyes. When things change in China they change in a big way, structurally. Whole chunks of the past have gone physically: the buildings simply aren’t there anymore. It is impossible to return to a place and experience a Proust-like recherché by immersing yourself in the physical environment. You can’t retrace steps you took then just a decade ago. I have spent months gathering images to conjure this past. Fortunately I kept diaries throughout the 1990s, and photographic records too so going back over this material I can see who was there, and details that might have been missed at the time. All the artists have moved on a long way since those days.

Q: So is this something maybe Yue Minjun was commenting on with those dinosaurs he made for the Shanghai Bienniale?

KS: I think he was in part testing his audience. Because when one is a famous artist in China audiences tend to accept anything they do as art. Because there is no critical debate then artists can at times get away with some outrageous “gaffs”. I feel that at some level Yue Minjun wants to see how far into fantasy he can push the boundaries. But at the same time, this was a project he conceived specifically for the Biennale, and so had been explained within the content of the theme which is Trans Local Motion….

Q: Which new artists are you working with?

KS: With new artists I am always keen to find individuals who are interested to see where the prevailing boundaries lie, either in terms of content, of materials, of disciplines and how they can push these open. I respond most to art that has powerful links to the times and context in which it is created. That doesn’t just mean young or emerging artists. For instance (the older) Liu Wei, makes extraordinary paintings that offer layered comment on the relationship of Chinese culture to landscape, to being cultivated, and how far these values have become inverted today.
Several of the younger artists I have been drawn to in recent years work in various media, sometimes simultaneously and are interesting because they are forging their own path, diametrically opposite to the current “masters”,. They are not afraid of small scales, of destroying work that doesn’t come out to their satisfaction, and of giving free rein to personal experiences, artists like Jia Aili, Qiu Xiaofei, Hu Xiaoyuan, Xu Zhen or Song Kun.
Visitors to China are increasingly seeking “the new generation”. For many reasons, recent graduates are the most difficult artists to work with—arrogant and vulnerable, overly confident and yet insecure. In the 1980s there was a proportionally significant volume of criticism. That has diminished in the ensuing dozen or so years, such that these young artists have grown up in a scene devoid of art criticism. There are several web-forums that are extremely popular today such as artbaba and heishehui, but they tend to be popular because people can insult each other anonymously.

Q: So do you feel that artists of the 1990s were sought out by westerners, but that this younger generation is more independent or working more for the local audiences?

KS: After June 4, amongst creative circles in China, there was a withdrawal from society. A period of introspection quite contrary to the mood of hope engendered by the fall of the Berlin Wall. For the Chinese artists, the only interest in their art at that time came from the outside world. Many individuals relocated abroad. Members of the Chinese avant-garde began to show their work abroad from the early 1990s, in both the US and in Europe and Japan. The majority of art selected contained some degree of political commentary, which as mentioned previously dovetailed with the aspirations at “the end of history” following the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the emphasis upon politics and not art, many of the artist who travelled abroad to participate in these exhibition returned home disillusioned. It took a long time for this situation to find redress and it has yet to achieve parity. I feel we made a valiant attempt with The Real Thing, but it always takes time for people to be comfortable with difference, beyond being drawn to mere familiar similarities.

Q: So what’s next…?

KS: I seem to be involved in a series of seminars, beginning with the Asia Art Forum in Shanghai. The book I have mentioned. In terms of exhibitions, the next project is about collaborations between visual artists and music makers for the Today Art Museum in Beijing which opens next April. It’s not an easy show to do in China, not that I am afraid to take risks. The goal is to offer a new perspective on art, to challenge some perceptions. But where Chinese art is concerned, for me, this is a continuous pursuit.