Angie Baecker on Exhibition Couture

2008.12.10

“The goal of the center, [Baron Guy Ullens] said, is to provide an exhibition space for artists from around the world but particularly for those from China who are less commercially oriented...” – “A Belgian Couple Will Give Beijing a New Home for Contemporary Art,” by Randy Kennedy, The New York Times, July 26, 2007

On November 21, 2008, a little more than a year after its grand opening on November 2, 2007, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art hosted a red-carpet gala to mark the opening of its fourth main-gallery exhibition, Christian Dior and Chinese Artists. The show, sponsored and produced by the fashion label Christian Dior, showcases commissioned works by twenty-two Chinese artists taking the Dior brand as inspiration.

Li Songsong, Lady Dior, 2008, neon lights and steel. Installation view, Christian Dior and Chinese Artists, UCCA, Beijing, 2008.

The result? Li Songsong, whose reputation is based on paintings like The Decameron, a thickly-wrought image offering insight into the nature of media, state, and society, has created a giant Lady Dior bag in neon lights. Zhang Huan, whose relevance today derives largely from challenging and masochistic performance pieces executed in the early Nineties, shows a portrait of Christian Dior “in the comfort of his country home,” according to the exhibition label.

Partygoers at the opening of Christian Dior and Chinese Artists, November 21, 2008. From left: Maggie Cheung, John Galliano, Charlize Theron, and Bernard Arnault.

The exhibition is curious, and not just for the works on view. The curatorial involvement of the UCCA itself seems dubious—director Jérôme Sans was just one member of a four-person curatorial team including three LVMH group employees, while anecdotal evidence suggests that Dior, and not UCCA staff, liased with the artists on all matters related to the production and display of their works. Neither UCCA nor LVMH has made public the nature or scale of Dior’s sponsorship, and yet the Center’s agenda and the interests of its sponsor already seem inextricably conflated.

When UCCA opened in November of 2007, its founders, quoted above, were in hot pursuit of the extended Chinese art community’s great white whale: the non-profit, non-state art institution. The gleaming and ghostly prospect of institutional agency separate from commercial or state interest has, for many years now, been powerfully mesmerizing. Witness the Today Art Museum, which opened in 2002 (and moved into its current building in 2006), and whose website today declares it “the first non-for-profit, non-governmental art museum in China.” But rhetoric here does not match practice: close ties with the area’s district government and price tags on their exhibition halls would seem to negate the descriptors above.

Baron and Baroness Guy and Myriam Ullens at the UCCA, November 21, 2008.

In fact, many organizations declare non-profit operating standards, but rather than evidencing the independence of their program, the “non-profit” moniker seems instead only to mark those whose ambitions exceed their means. Complicity between art and commerce is not a problem distinct to Beijing, and the branded exhibition has been a topic of debate for some time: Dior sponsored a show devoted to its own work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1996; the Guggenheim mounted an Armani retrospective in 2000. Nonetheless, greased by sponsorship and outright venue-rental fees, this collusion has recently come to a head in China: at UCCA, where Christian Dior and Chinese Artists makes a trend of nothing more than its artists' shared Chineseness; at the National Art Museum of China, which recently rented out its halls to MaxMara for Coats!; and at the Today Art Museum, which sold its prime Olympic programming window to Mercedes-Benz.

UCCA’s November 2007 opening certainly marked a moment of great anticipation. Even if the Center and the collectors behind it faced initial skepticism, the project’s scale, spectacle, and aspirations were remarkable, promising non-profit operation even if its title and registration were, by necessity of Chinese law, commercial. (UCCA is legally registered in China as “New Antwerp Cultural Exchange Consulting Ltd.”) Under Fei Dawei’s leadership, UCCA’s first exhibition—a historical look at the 1985 “New Wave” of art in China was not without issue, but it was with a curatorial vision, and accompanied by a substantial publication and education program. The second major show was Huang Yong Ping’s retrospective House of Oracles, which originated at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and toured through Mass MoCA and the Vancouver Art Gallery before ending its run at the UCCA, implicitly putting the Center on par with these other museums. This past summer’s collection show, Our Future: Guy and Myriam Ullens Collection, was not curated to the same standard as the first two shows, but it was at least generated by the center’s own team.

Zhang Huan, Christian Dior in the Comfort of his Country Home, 2008, ash on canvas. Installation view, Christian Dior and Chinese Artists, UCCA, Beijing, 2008.

In taking this show from Dior, the UCCA has effectively given up curatorial control over its own program. As the city finds itself largely bereft of art institutions with a meaningful claim to either legitimizing power or independent charge of their space, a chapter seems closed. Moby Dick looms, as ever, just beyond the horizon, and the realization of the China-based non-profit art center remains to be seen.

— 文/ Angie Baecker