I hate to start off on such a negative note but it’s is an absurd, jingoistic and presumptuous sentiment to even ask the question as to whether Asian or European art is more or less groundbreaking than art from any other place on the planet. Funny how American art doesn’t even rate a mention in the premise to this discussion. I once read a Jay Jopling quote some years ago that the only good art was being created in London (yet the rest England); it was as inane and meaningless a comment then about art from East London as it is about art from the East tonight.
I am admittedly not an expert on Asian art and certainly do not profess to be one, I only know what little I have seen in the galleries, books, magazines and auction houses. And with a population of over a billion in China, it would be rather surprising if there wasn’t at least some great art to emerge in the recent past. However, like George Washington, I am incapable of telling a lie: embarrassingly, I haven’t even been to the region yet, just another sheltered American living in London. But, with a grain of salt and without meaning to be flippant, what’s so groundbreaking in the sense of a true paradigm shift, about paintings made with ashes, depictions of family bloodlines, groups of smiley faces, baby Mao’s, Porsche and Pepsi signs and stacks of vases and chairs?
My point is that Asian art is no more or less exciting today then art from New Jersey, New Dehli or New Zeland. We live in a new, interdependent world order after years of lip service to globalization where artistic contributions with weight and quality arise from anywhere and everywhere. Such foolish, gratuitous and sweeping generalizations before us tonight are more marketing hype then meaningful. I’d say they are dangerous too, but in the context of the art world there is very little prospect of danger, other than being Ai Wei Wei or crushed by a toppling Richard Serra sculpture or whacked by a Christo umbrella.
If you phrased it in a wider sense, perhaps art from the emerging markets, including India, Russia, the Middle East but also you can’t count out South America, Africa … the world, it just doesn’t make sense any way you slice it. Great art emerges from all corners of the earth and the premise of this entire debate is rather superfluous altogether. Besides, not to be too cynical either, a lot of the art from the East seems calculated to titillate and feed into the voracious appetites and expectations of western collectors, a kind of reverse stereotyping where the art is an effort to give the buyer what they think Chinese art should be like for instance. In any event, the world is so homogenous with everyone watching the same crap on TV, same commercial movies, reading the same monotonous art magazines and web sites that often you would be hard pressed to differentiate art from one region of the world to the next.
Back to Ai Wei Wei, this truly is one of the only differentiating factors comparing art from one country to the next as there are very few places besides Russia where you put your life on the line just to express yourself; and, an artist can find themselves on the front page of the international newspapers and fundamentally threatened, thwarted and physically endangered just or picking up a paint brush or making an installation. Thus anxieties about loss of identity and cultural specificity are truly not the same in the West but they are also just as at stake in places as disparate as Cuba and the Middle East and any other regime where democracy is not fully tolerated or embraced as an option.
As far as the references to differing tastes, aspirations, and categories of consciousness, we are mostly all sadly striving for the same Prada defined spoils of mass consumerism. So yet again, I simply find many more similarities in the world today then differences. Thank you very much.
Kenny Schachter