Berlin has in recent years become a particular focal point for contemporary Chinese art. The journalist and writer Annett Busch has talked to some of the major galleries and art critics to find out why, and uncovered interesting trends in a fast changing scene.

Naked figures run, in „East-West“, amidst a vast urban space, towards the Brandenburger Tor -- the tiny, fuzzy digital assembled bodies beneath a significant historic symbol of neo-classical architecture. The metaphor of the long-distance runner couldn’t be more effective. Chi Peng is one of the youngest (b.1981) and most impressively productive shooting stars of the Chinese art scene and with his "Sprinting Forward" photo composition series in 2004 he captured the incoherence of the sense of both alienation and attraction towards a rapidly changing country. In particular, "Sprinting Forward II", with its multiplied naked silhouettes of the artist running alongside flashy red buses and hunted by red planes, became an icon of sexual vulnerability and imaginary nightmares, of stillness and speed. "East-West" appears like a final spurt, mirrored by "West-East" where the bodies become like weightless dragonflies, bird-people on their way towards East.

In his latest series of works around the "monkey king", Chi Peng deepens and adapts the image of the east-west relationship by taking up a classical novel, written in the 16th century by Wu Cheng’en. The story got quite famous outside of China as "Journey to the West" through pop-culture, comics and a Chinese TV-series. It's the fantastic journey of the monk Xuan Zang to India, whose aim is to bring Buddhist sutras back to China. The actual hero of the narration, however, is the smart and rebellious monkey king Sun Wukong who is endowed with magical skills. Among other things he is able to transform himself into 72 different shapes and creatures – a character almost predestined to serve as an ‘alter ego’ for Chi Peng. The artist has assembled a condensed narrative where the vertical timeline of tradition, ancient myths and modern lifestyle disappears and seems to unite both in productive but scary contradictions. The monkey series has recently been shown at Alexander Ochs Galleries in Berlin and will travel afterwards to his "White Space" in Beijing.

The Berlin-Beijing relationship

Alexander Ochs has been something of a pioneer in showcasing Chinese art in Germany. Ten years ago he opened the Alexander Ochs Galleries in a former factory building on Sophienstrasse in Berlin-Mitte with an exhibition called "No Chinese Art" exhibiting artists from China nobody had heard of before. Recently he has been celebrating the gallery’s first successful decade with an exhibition titled "Inferno in Paradise" and curated by Reinhard Spieler. It promises to be a show of potential connections with and beyond the artists Ochs already represents rather than a retrospective. As he explained: "There will be thrilling bi- and multilateral structures, ideas and dialogues – a kind of a criss-cross just as our world appears [i.e. just like the world itself – Ed]. That’s how Marlene Dumas and Wolfgang Leib will meet with Qiu Shihua and Yoo Junghyun, Yang Shaobin with Heribert C. Ottersbach or Qin Qin with Franz Gertsch."

Whereas the special Berlin-Beijing relationship may prove to be a long and legendary one, Alexander Ochs refers to it more as a matter of course: "I was always only interested in quality and the attitude towards art, not in ethnics…For me it didn’t matter at all if one lived in Bejing, Berlin or New York" adds Alexander Ochs. In the early 1990s before running a gallery, Ochs already curated exhibitions with Fang Lijun and Xu Bing who became central figures in the international art scene and are still represented by Ochs Galleries. "The first piece I sold was Xu Bing’s installation “The Book from the Sky”, that was in Spring 2000 to Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Today we're selling all over the world. Sure, 60% of the sales we do are in Asia but I'm still very grateful to collectors like Erika Hoffmann who bought the first group of Fang Lijuns xylography and who continues even now when MoMA is continuously collecting his work." "If Magritte was a cool Chinese guy, his work may have looked something like Fang Lijun’s", writes art critic Ben Davidson in the lifestyle Magazin "Beijing Scene".

Having written about Chinese art since 1997, after she came back from a trip to Beijing as a young, impressed and refined exchange student, art critic Ulrike Münter who recently did some groundbreaking research with a focus on Chinese women artists, takes up the Berlin-Bejing relation from a slightly other perspective. "After the crackdown of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 many of the artists moved to Berlin. Many of them preferred Germany to France or Great Britain and Berlin to Munich or Hamburg. Germany somehow had a better image and no colonial background in Asia, and also because of the Germany’s need to deal with their past. In China people are astonished but also fascinated by that. Some of the younger artists can get almost aggressive when I ask them about the impact of the Cultural Revolution or even the Tiananmen Square protests. That’s the history of their parents -- the younger [generation] reclaim their own.”

House of World Cultures

During the 1990s Berlin also played an important role regarding the presentation of contemporary art from China. In particular, House of World Cultures made a first step by showing "China Avantgarde", later in 2001 there was "Living in Time" in Hamburger Bahnhof, "About Beauty", 2005, and "China in between post and future" in 2006 again in House of World Cultures. Recently the brand new lifestyle magazine "Ilook" in Beijing commissioned an article by Ulrike Münter to write about the connections of Berlin and Beijing and there she concentrates on the impact of architecture and rapid large scale political and social change on the art scene – with a special emphasis on space. In Beijing as well as in Berlin huge, empty and former factory areas were transformed to art spaces and opened up new opportunities. In the area of the legendary Factory 798 in Beijing, a huge passage with bookshops, galleries and ateliers, initiated by the architect, artist and curator Ai Weiwei, one can also find Alexander Ochs "White Space". And again last year in Berlin new and young curators initiated, without any funding, a festival ambiguously titled "Made in China" (http://made-in-cn.de) and connected provocative art with specific public spaces. Their next step was to open a virtual gallery at www.johnnyjudgegallery.com a move consistent with their understanding of art as something that is about real and imaginary connections rather than representation.

Within the last two years, the scene has changed completely and the artists are "floating back to china". "And you shouldn't forget the aspect of food" Alexander Ochs adds with a notion of irony. "Democracy might be a good thing, but real chinese food...!" There is also an economic side to this move: "If you're thinking about from where you can [as an artist] (re-)launch a career, that will be Beijing and not Berlin. Curators and collectors from abroad are coming to Beijing and from there you can get international."

Besides Alexander Ochs in Berlin there is also Lothar Albrecht in Frankfurt/Main with "L.A. Galleries". "I brought Lothar to China" Ochs mentions fatherly and Lothar Albrecht likes to mention his passion for discovery. Albrecht started in the early 1990s with the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, nowadays mostly known as a winner of the Turner Prize, followed by artists like Tracy Moffatt, Oliver Boberg, Ken Lum, Naoya Hatakeyama, Peter Bialobrezski, Taiji Matsue or Javier Vallhonrat and Joan Fontcuberta who also became part of his program. And regarding his recent exhibition with Ma Jun and Huang Min and particularly last year "Samples from the Transition" with the work of Liu Ding, Albrecht’s approach to Chinese art is obviously different, operating on a conceptual level with a focus on themes like (art) production, exploring notions of copying and originality.

“Ma Jun und Huang Min are part of a generation which already takes the effects of China’s reforms and rapprochement with the West for granted. They face other questions than the generation before them...the small TV sets, cassette recorders, cars, cola bottles and cans, and other model products of Western affluent society, are made in Jindezhen. A centre of Chinese porcelain production for more than 1000 years, Jindezhen is itself a symbol of Chinese art and culture. The glazes in the traditional colours, the floral patterns, the folkloristic subjects and the characteristic surfaces that make the objects appear like very valuable arts and crafts, therefore, are all familiar even to the Western viewer" art-critic Bettina Schmitt has written commenting on L.A.Galleries.

Painting Factory

With his performance-installation "products" Liu Ding also works alongside the interface of cheap piecework production, (self) critical discourse and the capitalist patterns of the art market. Originally commissioned for the Second Guangzhou Triennial, "Products" invited a group of thirteen professional artists from the nearby city of Dafancun – China’s famed “painting factory” village, where workers produce thousands of paintings daily, fuelling a giant export business – to perform their assembly-line painting process during the opening of what is arguably China’s most important international art exhibition. In the L.A. Gallery "Products" became itself a product, encased in custom Plexiglas vitrine and ensconced in a nimbus of Flavinesque fluorescence.

Speaking of criticality, tendencies and perspectives, Alexander Ochs once again has some comments and ideas in mind which concentrate more on sustainability. "It is difficult to speak about tendencies and perspectives in a society which is so rapidly changing like the Chinese one. What counts for the whole country is also obvious in art. I think we should leave the decision up to the Chinese how to proceed - the only thing we could do is to initiate structures which could give some space to create and reflect common experiences. Therefore as a present to celebrate our tenth jubilee, together with the 'EurAsian Culture Exchange' Foundation, we’re building an art-hall in Beijing understood as a space for discours3 - which I think is more than necessary."

Meanwhile Ulrike Münter is preparing her book about female Chinese artists. "Most of their works don't have this 'Chinese factor' and the West is therefore responding with lower prices. You never see them drawing a Mao-portrait, but anyhow, who is still painting Mao, that's only for export business." She likes the challenge of her job. "The art-scene develops in such a tremendous speed that all you write is immediately historic." The monkey has already prepared a new, unexpected image.

by Annett Busch