Transcript of the Interview with Melissa Chiu ( 招颖思 )

Transcription

1 Transcript of the Interview with Melissa Chiu ( 招颖思 ) Melissa Chiu ( 招颖思 ) China Boom Project, Asia Society 2009 Director, Asia Society Museum in New York Industry: Arts & Culture Dr. Melissa Chiu is director of the Asia Society Museum in New York and vice president of the Society's Global Arts Programming. She has spoken at numerous American universities, including Harvard University. She was a Getty Research Fellow ( ) and has served on grant and policy advisory committees for the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Chiu is a member of the Academic Advisory Board, Asia Art Archives, Hong Kong and is a founding member of the Asian Contemporary Art Consortium in New York, a group serving the interests of Asian art and culture at the world's leading museums and galleries. She is an active member of the American Association of Art Museum Directors. She has served as an editor for Asian contemporary art for The Grove Dictionary of Art, published by Oxford University Press in London and New York, and is the author and editor of many books, monographs, and anthologies. Prior to joining Asia Society, Chiu was founding director of the Asia-Australia Arts Centre in Sydney, Australia ( ). She earned her Ph.D. in Art History and MA in Arts Administration in her native Australia Transcript Interviewee: Melissa Chiu ( 招颖思 ) Interviewer: John Delury Date: February 26, 2009 Place: New York City (USA) MelissaChiuLogging.mov 12, 20 March 2009 Well first of all thank you for taking the time to sit with the China Boom Project. Um, since as you know we re part of what we re doing is creating a video archive for historians 1

2 and researches, decades, hopefully centuries from now, to hear how people thought in this moment looking back on the last 30 years of China. Um, for their sake probably the best place would be to start with who you are. Um, introduce yourself and your you know regional, educational background, and then career trajectory, kind of focusing on how it overlaps with China, and with, to some extent, the economic side of China s boom, as we call it, since 78. 0:41: Sure, my name is Melissa Chiu and I m director of the Asia Society Museum and vicepresident of global art programs. I was, I was born and educated in Australia, born in Darwin and educated in Sydney, and my father is Chinese, from ah, southern China, and then his family migrated to Hong Kong, and my mother is Australian. I spent um, most of my ah, life in Australia growing up, and have been here in the United States at Asia Society for about eight years now. 1:19: Um I first came into contact with Chinese artists in Sydney, when I was actually studying at the University of Western Sydney, and this was a generation of artists who had just participated in Tiananmen Square events. Um, like the US uh, Australia had actually admitted and accepted about 20,000 uh, Chinese students, uh in the post-tiananmen events. And these artists had come to Australia not just after Tiananmen but in the lead up to Tiananmen. Because as we know in the 1980s we often categorize that decade as being gripped by leave the country fever. That artists if they could get opportunities, they took them. And many artists took opportunities in Australia either to study at ah art school or to do residencies or do ah connect, reconnect with other family members. 2:19 And so when Tiananmen actually happened, a lot of those artists decided to stay and they were given, ah granted residency status um when June Fourth happened. So I was lucky enough to meet this community of artists; in fact I was involved in organizing an exhibition at my university, and actually involved also in interviewing a number of them from that period. And from that became connected also back to China. I went first in 1992 to see what was going on, ah, I saw a number, visited a number of artist studios in Beijing and some in Shanghai, and started to just acquaint myself with what was going on. This was ah, fairly difficult time for artists who were living in China actually. Most of them were living in fairly impoverished circumstances, the creation and production of their work was in rather meager studios, um, very few of them had international careers. 3:18: When I went, returned uh three years later in 1995 things had changed, tre-, um, gradually, although they, what had really happened was that a number of the artists, especially the political pop artists, had found international ah, careers and markets for their work, and so you almost had a distinction between ah, artists who had mostly set up at the Summer Palace, Artist s Village, who were international and the political pop and cynical realist artists, but at the same time you had emerge an even younger generation of artists, ah, who were doing radical performance works. And they set themselves in some ways in contrast to the political pop and cynical realist painters. They were doing radical performances, artists like Ma Liu Ming and Zhang Huang were really um trying to come to 2

3 grips with the fact that they couldn t show their work, uh, in any of the galleries or staterun museums, so they were doing it in their studios or the environs around this village. It was basically a rural village that, where they had moved into because of the cheap rents and they lived alongside farmers and all sorts of other people. A lot of the migrants that had come to Beijing to, ah, build the new apartment blocks and things like that. Um, so you know it was kind of an interesting time, and I guess from those kinds of experiences I began to curate some of those artists in exhibitions, and have obviously continued with my work here at Asia Society as well. 4:57: So, just to, to understand, in the, in the 90s pre-asia Society years, in what capacity, were you working pretty independently, or working with you know 5:09: Yeah, I was working as an independent curator to organize exhibitions, at, ah, museums in Sydney. And so w in that capacity I had um, organized, for example, an exhibition with Wang Yu Shen, who was one of the leaders of the New Wave 85 Movement and we did a solo exhibition of his work at the state museum called the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and he, it was a great interactive project where he I, invited members of the, or visitors to the museum, to create their own photographs from his archive of negatives that he had done. He actually worked at the China Youth Daily, as an editor, and so had ah, great access to the media, and things like that, and was one of the few people actually during the 1990s who was able to negotiate, um, the kind of ah relationship between the Propaganda Department and the authorities. 6:13: So he became an important kind of intermediary for international exhibitions. And um toward the late 1990s, I became more involved also with Chinese artists who had been born in Australia, kind of Chinese-Australians, and we established together ah, place called the Asia-Australia Art Center, and it was a non-profit contemporary art center and so from that we started to bring together some of those Chinese-Australians or Asian- Australian artists with exhibitions of ah, Asian artists. So sometimes artists from China, sometimes also Chinese-Australian artists to kind of bring them together. 6:58: And that was part of the environment I found myself in Australia, that things had really evolved, bearing in mind that um, I kind of came of age professionally in the Keating years. And so Paul Keating had a very progressive notion of Australia reorienting itself to be part of Asia, ah, obviously geographically it is, but culturally it really hadn t been up until his ah, leadership. And so I found myself, ah, in an environment where there were many professional opportunities to travel, all throughout Asia to do cultural exchanges, curate exhibitions, visit many many different places for research activities. And so it was a very unusual environment to kind of um, to be able to participate in a kind of new ah, new culture, I guess you might describe it as. 3

4 7:50: I want to, we ll come back and focus on the art side, but while we re talking about Australia You may be our first Australian in the Boom Project so you get a lot of authority to speak Oh yes, John 8:01: But I m just curious. Could you talk a little bit more about that, and again, in the, from the perspective of what we re looking at with this focus on the economic growth From the perspective of Australia, how much of that reorientation, um, you know, is a simple response to, say, China s rise, or first the rise of the other, you know, the Tigers, and then China. Um, how much of it is non-economic? I mean, how would you connect the story of Australia reorienting ( mm hm) and now (yeah) kind of a new push of orientation toward Asia (yeah), um, with the economic 8:39: Yeah I think that certainly there were, was, an economic imperative at the heart of this reorientation that what seemed to be converging at the time was the European and NAFTA and so the Australian government I think saw very clearly that in terms of trading blocs, Australia had to play a role in bringing together regional discussion. And they certainly did that through APEC Group, but they also sought to do it culturally, and they did it through a number of initiatives that were government supported, much in the same way that I think European countries see culture as being a very important way of connecting with other nations. Uh, it doesn t happen here in the United States because there s no ministry for culture. The configuration is very different. But in a place like Australia, there was at first an economic imperative, which went hand in hand with the cultural imperative. 9:52: Um so let's get back to the cultural side. Maybe ask the same question really but now in getting back to China. Um, when you look back both with your personal experience, starting out from say the 80s, the late 80s, and also what you know about all these artists and what they were up to from the 70s, um, how would you put together the kind of economic boom narrative with the art boom. I mean if we say it's the China Boom project and we talked about art, what does it look like? How do you put it together over this 30 year period? 10:25: Yeah, it's I mean, uh, the, ah, my initial response would be that they almost operate um, in very similar trajectories. Um, that if you look at the art market for example, uh, the art market really was... non-existent, um, say ten years ago for Chinese contemporary art. That there are a few things being bought and sold, mostly uh expatriates or people who were living, foreigners who were living in China, who would really collect art out of more... 4

5 out of a kind of souvenir idea, that they were living in China, they wanted to take something back home when they left, and so, wasn't really uh, sense of a field of wanting to collect Chinese contemporary art. There are of course a handful of exceptions; we know very well that Guy and Miriam Orlenz (sp?) have been collecting, as have uh, as has, Orley Sig (sp?), so there were some exceptions, but really um, as a field of inquiry, and a ah field for collecting didn't exist. 11:41: What really changed things was the auction market, and when the first auction was I think in 2006 in Hong Kong which I think set the very beginning of this market in motion. Where on the contemporary art side there were a number of uh, paintings sold at the auction that reached record-breaking prices, and of course the records were already very low, so we saw in just only a few years ago this kind of exponential rise in prices. And um, so I think that that also went hand-in-hand with a lot of ideas of foreign investment in China; of course foreign investment in China is much older, but it really escalated to a point that where we, we got this strong sense that people wanted to have a piece of China, that they wanted to invest in China, so some of them chose to invest in art. Um, so when we think of the economic, um, trajectory, and the cultural trajectory, we think of markets, I mean the flip side of this of course is what was really going on in the art world. 12:57: (Corrected TC: 17:30) And I think that the real shift actually happened not with the auctions but rather with the acceptance of the Chinese government of contemporary, experimental art. Which changed in That from, you, you, we kind of think of Chinese contemporary as occurring in three different phases. Post-79, so we have the 1980s, which was really furious, frenetic experimentation, that this was when artists uh coming out of the Cultural Revolution had first access to Western art magazines, to Western books, um, so they kind of had this idea that they were trying to kind of find their individual voice with all of this flood of new information about art. Then post June Fourth '89 was what happened was that that whole generation of artists who had um to some degree participated in a huge liberalization process, they had been given uh fair, a fair degree of freedom; in fact, some of you know the art students were involved in protests at Tiananmen. They had done the "goddess of democracy" which became the motif, and some of that was even funded by the art schools. So there was at this time a kind of um crossover between uh the official world and the unofficial world. You kind of saw this um support for the experimentation of art, but what happened in June Fourth '89 was that there was a crackdown. And those that had become the leaders of this art movement were forced out of their jobs, were prevented from organizing exhibitions, and for others it mean that they simply couldn't show their work in China. 14:41: So the 1990s if anything I think is a process of internationalization. That artists sought out very actively um and aggressively opportunities outside of their country. I remember visiting China and you would be on the steps of the National Art Museum, in Beijing, and these contemporary artists would approach you on the steps as a foreigner and they would give you magazines and books that they had published that were hypothetical drawings of installations and works that they could possibly stage at your museum. So this I mean these artists were very savvy. They were not just working in their ivory tower museums, in their ivy tower studios, they knew that in order to show their work it had to 5

6 be outside of China. So you had within that decade the political pop and cynical realism artists; they were doing very well in the gallery system. Also they were showing their work in places like the Venice Biennale, which is the premier contemporary art um event, and you know so, and then, and then towards the end of the decade you started to get lots and lots of museum survey exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art. 15:57: That the first ones were in 1993 in 3 places, in Hong Kong, Sydney, and Berlin. But after those shows you had a successive kind of snowballing effect from the Venice Biennale to even here at Asia Society in 1998 we staged the first US museum exhibition called "Inside Out: New Chinese Art" curated by Gaoming Lu, who incidentally was one of the uh curators of the China avante-garde exhibition in 1989 just months before the uh, Tiananmen incident. Which was a watershed moment for the avant-garde movement in China. And then if we think of 2000 as the turning point, that was really the moment at which the Chinese authorities I think decided that contemporary, experimental art was less of a threat to their authority. And so you had kind of an opening up that ex, uh, that international style, art, by that we mean installation art, video art, medias like that could now be shown in Chinese state-run museums. And it started in the Shanghai Art Museum with the Shanghai Biennale. And so it's not to say that artists could now show anything, ah because there had been incidents of shutting down shows and there still are, but generally speaking you have a kind of greater um uh access to museums for artists than ever before. So the kind of trajectory of contemporary Chinese art as we know it, um, is one of kind of, um, almost uh, uh, artists ah, pushing the limits of what was possible. And then of course somebody saying, "No," and then it would happen again, so I think that that kind of characterizes how artists have kind of come into conflict with the state. 17:51: What um, that's a very hopeful, clear framework. What happened in 2000, I mean why, what accounts for that somewhat dramatic um turn? 18:04: Yeah I mean some people have, have thoughts that it was to do with China joining the WTO. So the idea that the government wanted to show that ah, China was kind of opening up, that it was allowing greater freedoms within society. I think it also coincided with a number of cultural exchanges with countries that were part of the Year of China exchange. It was obviously trade exchange, ah, but it also always had a cultural component. And so the exhibitions at places like Sondre Pompidou in Paris, um, showed actually artworks that had, had had, you know, probably wouldn't have been able to have been shown in China, 5 or 10 years beforehand, but under the leadership of ah curators like Fan Dian, who was very close to those in the government, he was able to broker these large-scale exhibitions I think that, ah, that kind of showed that contemporary art was not poli, I mean it was not political. In um, it was not only political. I mean, I mean the thing is that some contemporary art obviously is, but not all contemporary art is, so he was trying to actually loosen things up, and you know, I mean it's true the work of individuals also that have paved the way for this opening up as well. 6

7 19:40: Um you know one, um, I'm thinking of some of the questions that we ask with when we talk with economists who are trying to explain the sheer economic part of the boom, and again I think it's interesting to ask these in the realm of art and culture that you know about. Um, so one of those questions would be, you know, when you look at China's economy, it averages out at about 10% GDP growth for 30 years, this kind of incredible achievement at a macro-economic level, and yet there's a whole debate about it, both the nature of that growth, how sustainable it is, how widespread are the benefits, and specifically that you know how the the rapidity may have a lot of negatives associated with it, since it's actually too fast, you know, and now that it's going through a major slowdown, more and more people are saying maybe this is actually good. It's slowing down to a healthy fast growth. Is that applicable in art? I mean, can you talk about um bubbles bursting, can you talk about the too much liquidity you know in a cultural, in a cultural sense? Does that play out? 20:46: I mean I think the kind of tangible reference would be the market. In terms of the, the rising prices. That it went from nothing to paintings that were worth $20 million in five years. So what you had were a number of people who were flipping works. They were buying and selling very quickly in order to make profit. Um, I think the other side of it though is that artists, because of this uh, marketplace, which was voracious, I mean artists had uh, they had, waiting lists of people for their work, they were starting to do editions, ever-large, ever-larger editions to cope with um the waitings? of people just simply wanting to buy their work. Um, I do think it also had an impact on um, say the photographers. Uh, or sculptors, that we saw uh a kind of um, uh, an idea that you know if you created an image that you could do an unlimited edition, photographic practices are that you keep an edition small, and you keep to it. That it's out of ten images or it's out of twenty or whatever, but there are some kind of slightly um cloudy edition-ing processes with all of that. I think that there was just enormous pressure on artists to produce a lot of work, and so I think that right now what we're seeing is a time when the market has actually dropped off. That the market ha-, that the prices have lowered, and we will see what happens in the future. But actually most people think that this is um a much better time for art-making, because the pressure is off. You know there were some artists who were doing ah, political-type works that people felt were just reproducing the image, even painters, were just reproducing the image over and over again to supply this voracious market. And I think that now many people consider this kind of as rest time. This is recuperative time when there's no pressure to produce the iconic image that everybody wants, that artists should really be treating it as a time when they can actually just, be able to formulate their new series of works or their new ideas without this kind of enormous pressure bearing down on them. 7

8 23:27: Um you know last summer during the Olympic frenzy, trying to have an original thought... (unintelligible) um I didn't get there, I was thinking about art and what the Olympics meant in kind of the history of contemporary Chinese art and thinking back to '89 and the important role that artists played as you mentioned even at the organized level of the academy. Versus the role that artists played, ah, um, in the Olympics. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, you know about the significance of that event, as an event in Chinese art history. What you think again, a hundred years from now, how might it be looked back upon?... (trails off) 24:12: Yeah, I mean, I think, usually I mean I think of Olympics as sporting events, first and foremost, and so generally they don't have a big impact um on the art world or cultural production. However for the Beijing Olympics there were a number of artists involved in the preparation, planning, and um, overseeing of the event, from Ai Weiwei, who is credited with the original idea for the Bird's Nest and his title was this kind of artistic advisor to Herzog & de Meuron, the architects. There was also Caiguo Qiang, who was responsible for the ah, the explosional pyrotechnic events. And there were others ah, Tan Dun was involved early on, and Shin Wei, the dance or choreographer. You know so at its heart this was an event where creativ, I mean the government and the authorities obviously though this was opporunity for us to actually look at creativity in China, how do we put that out to a world that is watching. So they did actually select major figures and I think that, Caiguo Qiang, is certainly this was a platform, that ah you know you wouldn't get in the art world. This is an international platform for him to be able to do um you know a major project in a way that you know I mean no museum would have the kind of budget that the Olympics gave him. Um at the same time I think that ah there were tensions I think for people watching closely with the artists working with the Chinese government in the, that if you look at some of the comments that were made both in China and abroad, even here in the United States, that Cai was I think uh, ah, criticized for working with the government, you know. And I think that that's the line that artists always have to walk, if they're going to collaborate with any government, um so I think that that's one concern. I think that he actually issued a press release about just after the ah explosion event because the event that was shown on television was actually doctored. And so this, we you know, have lots of concerns about the authenticity and the truth of what we see on television so that also generated debate. But I think that generally I, I, don't think it, the Olympics, will have a huge impact on creativity or the art world as we know it in China. It was certainly an important mark, a kind of cultural moment for every Chinese person around the world, that here was enormous pride ah to hosting this Beijing Olympics which was actually a great success for China. So you know and and I think it was a positive thing to involve artists; we don't always see them involved in Olympic events. 27:27: Yeah the games gave almost a Wagnerian you know cant to this, and for Zhang Yimou too, who is another one of... So I was wondering if you could say a few things about film too, I mean in terms of, because film um is ah, a sphere of art that obviously is, is even 8

9 more related to the economic budgets to do big stuff versus the early Chinese film... How do you see, would you sketch out for us... the development? (trails off, Mel starts cutting in) 28: 04:...Film in some ways has some semblance to the visual art world in that the post-cr generation who were often called the Fifth Generation were the first generation to become truly international superstars. You know Zhang Yimou and Gong Li and all those figures have really gained international acceptance. I think however it's probably the work of Jia Jiangke, and the younger artists now who are receiving some international attention because there are elements that critique things that that we associate with the kind of China Boom. They show the underbelly if you like of the rapid development that we associate with ah China today. Um, you know, I mean I think that this idea of international acceptance is one that is fairly important to those in the creative fields in China today, that you know, it's not just about getting a bigger platform for your work, but it's also um, kind of ah, trying to make people understand I guess that Chinese, that China has a long history, that it's not just the CR and that kind of iconography that, that we should be thinking of when we think of China today. 29:33: That's very interesting you raise the point of artists as critics of commercialization, I mean in a way you have, you've described these two interesting phenomena where the crackdown sends the artists out into the world, they're kind of globalized, in a way it adds to their repoirtoire, and then many of them are invited back... That's right. To participate at the highest level at the Olympics, and in a way somewhat you also have this phenomenon of all the money pouring in- foreign and domestic- funding the art world, again giving it resources it didn't have, studios (unintelligible) maybe you could talk a little about that compared to what you saw in the 1990s, and then many of those artists turning against and criticizing the commercialization that in a sense has produced them... 30:24: I mean I think that one of the interesting drivers of a lot of growth and also the sophistication of Chinese contemporary art was also the returned Chinese. That actually towards 2000 when things started to be a bit easier for artists there was a real exodus back to China, and these were from artists who had left in the late 80s and early 1990s so they had kind of been outside of China for a decade. They had been in places like New York, Sydney, Berlin, London, and there was a real sense that they wanted to return and with that return though they brought um a kind of understanding of how the system worked outside of China. And so to some extent you know there is some debate about how this uh returning diaspora has also changed China. And you know, I mean I think that it's something is interesting because this diaspora, at least the visual arts diaspora, the artists, 9

10 when they were living and working outside of China, they actually created works that were often more identified with traditional values, beliefs, motifs. And in contrast to the peers who remained in China, who were much more interested in everyday kind of conceptual concerns, so by returning we've also seen a, a, kind of uh, coming together of the overseas community that was once very separate, and the domestic community together, and so we're also seeing more and more artists use traditional motifs and methods in their work. Uh before and in the 1990s we didn't see that at all, so there are these kinds of uh I think seismic shifts that are going on and because of these communities coming together. 32:27 That's very interesting. OK well it's about time to let you off the hook. So the last question is to predict the future, and, and sort of um, you know, dream out what you see again (sudden camera shift down right) it's an interesting moment, now that you touched on this, with the economy slowing down swiftly, all those stabilizing... I mean, stepping back and looking in the bigger term, I mean the question we ask in the kind of political economy world, realm, is where do you see this going... We've had 30 years of reform and opening, are there going to be another 30, do you expect some political shift, what do you think will happen economically... Again, applying that to the world of art in its relation to the economic boom, what do you see happening, what do you see are the bigger trends going out from here? 33:21: I think the biggest issue for the Chinese art world is in the infrastructure. That you have a very sophisticated artist community who have been, you know, these artists and curators have been working with museums all across the world, and now what we're seeing is just in its infancy is a museum boom. That both the government is developing hundreds of new museums, mostly archaeological and historical museums but nevertheless museums that are engaged in... training professionals in the field. And you also have a number of, large number of, private contemporary art museums, and so I think this next phase that we're going to see in the next years is actually the um infrastructure or the kind of um uh it's the ah you know ah, the places that all of this artwork need to be shown. And so I think that that will drive the development of Chinese contemporary art, and the other side is of course criticism and scholarship that is in its beginning stages in the Academy in places like the National Academy in Hangzhou and also the Central Academy, that during the last um market boom uh there were many in China who who complained, um, about the lack of criticism. You know that the only criteria for success or failure was the marketplace and prices, and so I think that what we're going to see is a kind of deepening of the kind of infrastructure in the art world and that is through museums and art critics and all of the things, magazines and journals and things like that around it. And I think you'll see a continuing of international focus because the work is still strong, there's a new crop of artists who are doing great work, you know the, the, the interest is there. It's just now that we're gonna see it focused more internally and domestically on buildling up and being able to show and collect artists. 10

11 *The full-length video of this interview is available in the online repository of Rutgers University Libraries: 11