Daring exhibitions, lackluster sales and lingering tensions over censorship marked the eighth edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing (GWBJ), which concluded on Sunday (June 4). It was its first iteration since China lifted most of its Covid restrictions and reopened fully to international visitors.
With 21 Beijing galleries, five institutions and 13 visiting galleries, GWBJ sits between two of the city’s major art fairs, Beijing Contemporary Art Expo (April 28 to May 1), better known by its Mandarin name Beijing Dangdai, and JingArt (June 1 to 4), which this year is associated with the weekend of galleries. The confluence of events over the past six weeks has provided a landmark season for Beijing’s art scene, which has been battered by three years of zero Covid measures and simmering political tensions. “The economy is bad, the mood is worse,” said a gallerist, asking to remain anonymous: A veil has settled over the city following the high-profile censorship of comedian Li Haoshi last month. His management company was fined $2 million after making a joke referring to the Chinese military.
Nonetheless, many saw the gallery weekend as a much-needed opportunity to forge and re-establish connections after years of isolation. “After three years, we meet friends from all over the world,” says GWBJ director Amber Wang. She assumes that the pandemic has changed people’s priorities and that exhibitions taking place around the gallery weekend must be exciting enough to attract crowds. This poses a big challenge, she says, forcing GWBJ to be “more proactive.”
According to Wang, the opening attracted more than 50 out-of-town collectors from cities including Nanjing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Qingdao, as well as Hong Kong and Singapore. Poor flight availability has kept institutional visitors mostly based in Asia, except for a few key foreigners, like Nora Lawrence, chief curator of New York’s Storm King Art Center.
Installation view of Qin Yifeng at Magician Space, Beijing
Courtesy of Magician Space, Beijing
Notable exhibitions include a solo exhibition of Ma Quisha at the Beijing Municipality, which features a unique work not intended for sale, No. 52 Liulichang East Street. Referencing the capital’s now defunct iconic antiques market, the artist has packaged treasures and ephemera referencing his family history and Chinese cultural exports in a replica display case. Other highlights include the Qin Yifeng series of negatives at Magician Space, which reverses the process of photography, and Chris Zhongtian Yuan’s videos, installations and sketches that meditate on mortality at the Macalline Art Centre.
In the longtime artist village of Songzhuang, the new Sound Art Museum has opened with impressive installations. Inaugural exhibits include a permanent audio history of old Beijing and early Chinese sound installations. According to the museum’s director and co-founder, curator and artist Colin Chinnery, for Beijing “after the end of the initial easing of restrictions, the awareness of a new economic reality is dawning for people”. The mood is “of cautious optimism, with an emphasis on caution,” he adds. About GWBJ, he says: “It was nice to see artists and projects from all over the world again, with artists actually present. It feels like reconnecting with the world. It is absolutely essential for the art world to recover here.
This post-Covid economic reality is not only felt, but seen: Beijing, like the rest of China, remains pockmarked by boarded up windows. This is the case in the Caochangdi district, from which several galleries left at the height of the Covid. Those that remain include White Space, ShanghArt, and Ink Studio, all of which are back in action. Meanwhile, empty spaces are filling up again in studios. In the Shunyi District, adjacent to the airport, the Blanc Art Free Trade Zone now houses several galleries like Lisson and White Space, as well as additional storage and short-term space. During the opening week of GWBJ, Blanc Art organized a pop-up exhibition in cooperation with Hong Kong institution Tai Kwun Contemporary to show artists from Myth Makers—a recent exhibition of Asian LGBTQ art.
GWBJ is operated by Beijing 798 Culture Technology, which oversees 798 Art Zone and is owned by state-owned electronics conglomerate SevenStar Group. Last year, the group fired Wang Yanling, 798’s popular manager since 2011, over allegations of misconduct, and replaced him with Teng Yanbin.
But it’s the broader politics, rather than changes in leadership, that appears to be responsible for heightened censorship concerns as GWBJ opens. After Li Haoshi was fined $2 million, paintings of soldiers from Yue Minjun’s long-running series resurfaced online with pro-government commentators claiming the artist mocked the military. This resulted in reports of Beijing galleries subsequently censoring or self-censoring all military imagery.
“The censors were all over GWBJ,” said another gallerist, speaking on condition of anonymity. After the Li Haoshi incident, they fear civilian digital vigilantes almost as much as official censors. “The government operates as much on perception as on reality. Right now, in culture and entertainment, he’s actively creating an environment where everyone assumes the government cares, whether that’s literally true or not,” the gallerist said. “I expect contemporary art to be part of this change. The reality is that open censorship is probably the old-fashioned way. There are probably newer methods involving decentralized and participatory monitoring and reporting in use today. Even support visitors can post images which are then “fetched by wumao [nationalistic reposters] who are encouraged to report events of interest.
The censorship was “pretty much the same as always,” GWBJ director Wang countered. “The censorship and the security guards have always been there, and the guards are there more for security and crowd management than surveillance.”
“We carried out self-censorship by preparing [Yang’s] exhibition,” exploring how netizens circumvented social media censorship during Shanghai’s harsh lockdown last year, a White Space gallery spokesperson said. “Before the opening, disturbing events occurred in the arts and culture sector, but we still managed to carry out the exhibition with a positive and flexible attitude.”
For the first time, GWBJ has divided the foreign and Chinese galleries into separate locations. A number of gallery owners reported somewhat conservative sales figures throughout the weekend. “The most explicit difference in this incarnation was the lack of people,” says Mathieu Borysevicz, the Shanghai Bank gallery founder, who has been attending GWBJ since 2021. “Last year it was buzzing” even with the Covid checks; “This year is just noticeably quieter.” He says there is now a “distinct lack of foot traffic in China in general. It just feels lower energy these days after Covid.
Bank brought concept photographs by Patty Chang, who had a solo show at the nonprofit 798 Macalline Art Center last year, and sculptures by Zhang Yibei. Chang’s works were from a show scheduled for Shanghai in 2022, scuttled by censorship. Sales were brisk, especially to familiar collectors. “The price for everything was around 80,000 Chinese yuan and below, so maybe that’s one of the reasons we did so well. I think people these days are very careful about spending money and maybe we fell below or within their budgets. Bank also joined Beijing Dangdai, selling well with works priced below 60,000 RMB.
Foreign galleries that participated included Timothy Taylor, David Kordansky and Chantal Crousel. “We did a good job for Gallery Weekend,” said Chantal Crousel’s China Director, Wang Wan. The Parisian gallery has presented works by the artist Mimosa Echard, and is also organizing an ephemeral exhibition by Wade Guyton à Blanc until the end of June, after a group exhibition in October 2021 when the project opens. “We don’t really do too many fairs in China and never in Beijing, and since we don’t have spaces in China, we need more opportunities to present exhibitions [longer] than fairs of a few days for the local public,” says Wan. “We have a lot of Asian/Chinese customers because we started working in the market quite a long time ago, and Beijing is still one of the most important cities playing an irreplaceable role in today’s art ecosystem. , past and future.
“Beijing is definitely a place where you have to appear,” Borysevicz says. “There are more serious collectors in Beijing than anywhere else in China, but there are also artists, other galleries and the media industry.” Beijing and Shanghai are “like apples and oranges, they both serve different purposes”.
