2010, Young People Upstairs" 2010 Chinese Young Critics Nomination Exhibiti
Preface
LuAng
CEO,Guardian Online Auctions Ltd. Company
Over the years, Guardian Online has committed to the exploration of the resources of academies of fine arts, and the finding and fostering of young artists. The elite education of fine arts in China indicates that Chinese academies of fine arts have gathered talents with greatest potential to become artists. As the earliest and most influential artwork trading website in China, Guardian Online has been recommending rising artists since 2000, especially by working with major academies of fine arts in China. Many young artists got their first exhibitions and made their first auctions on Guardian Online. In a decade, some innocent boys and girls have grow into powerful supporters of today's art market, such as Xiang Jing, Ji Dachun, Xia Junna, Li Jikai, Wei Jia and Xiong Yu.
Youth at People Upstairs -- Nomination Exhibition of Young Critics 2010 is a big event marking the 1Oth anniversary of Guardian Online when we are summarizing our efforts in the last decade and looking forward to the future.
The prominent achievements during 30 years of reform and opening-up, the position as the second largest economy in the world in terms of GDP, and the economic growth despite the current global financial crisis have proved China's rising in economy. However, does the rising in economy leads to the rising of the nation? And what roles will art and culture play in this rising?
When comparing American art in 300 years with Chinese contemporary art in 30 years, We can find that the booming of American abstract expressionism and its eventual becoming a symbol of American art setting the trend in the world can be primarily attributed to its powerful, systematic and institutionalized art criticism. It was not Clement Greenberg himself but he and his followers that jointly established a systematic package of art criticism, producing powerful voice and establishing great discourse power, thus forming public opinion to facilitate American abstract expressionism to be recognized by the world. On the contrary, Chinese contemporary art was born and developed in substantial absence of art criticism.
Both art criticism and artistic creation require independence, which secures the individuality of the latter and the objectiveness and justice of the former. If objective and independent art criticism is maneuvered by the market, independent and critical contemporary artists will disappear. Therefore, to achieve the sound development of Chinese contemporary art and make it an important force in the art market, we need both insightful individual art critics and an independent and objective group of art critics to produce powerful voice that is inherited and continuous, thus guiding artistic creation and maintaining market order.
Both art market practitioners and the people involved in contemporary art collection want to know the ideas of artists themselves and can benefit from the academic viewpoints of critics. This nomination exhibition by young critics can be deemed as a trial by Guardian Online to establish the critical system of Chinese contemporary art.
Artists are both a scarce resource of the society and a group most closely approaching human soul. Unfortunately, the booming artwork trading market is inducing the public to interpret artists largely from prices while neglect their value for human soul. In fact, artists, especially young artists, eagerly need the care, recognition and concern from the society.
What Guardian Online can do is to provide a stage for this rising and pioneering power. On this platform, we want to see that young artists and young critics interact with each other to perform great shows and open a new chapter in Chinese contemporary art, because you are the future and hope of Chinese art market.
Preface
Wang Yi
Director of Beijing Times Art Museum
As an academic exhibition, The Youth at People Upstairs -- Nominations Exhibition by Young Critics 2010 aims to rationally construct and theoretically guide pioneering art through the professional recommendation and selection by young critics, thus driving the development of Chinese contemporary art. Meanwhile, it is a practice of Beiing Times Art Museum to contribute to the development of Chinese pioneering art.
As an important part of art ecology, critics have long been an important ideological resource driving the development of Chinese contemporary art. However, with the diversification of the market, art criticism has been strongly commercialized, and the standpoint of criticism is increasingly questioned. Meanwhile, a large number of commercial exhibitions under the banner of critics have flooded for a period of time, carrying tags varying from“art history" to "history" to puzzle the people. Therefore, we want to use nonprofit exhibitions like The Young People Upstairs to recover the purity of critics and manifest the value and honor of criticism. Of course, the fact that Beijing Times Art Museum established the curatorial team primarily consisting of new generation critics in this exhibition is not a value judgment but a consideration of their dynamic contemporary participation, which ensures their natural sensitiveness to pioneering art.
We are glad to see such sensitiveness can be transformed into the creative selection of works and eventually ensure that this exhibition will become one of the important exhibitions presenting pioneering art in recent years. Meanwhile, during the preparation for the exhibition, we are glad to find the team spirit of “harmony in diversity" among these most vigorous young critics. We can say that they masterminded the whole exhibition in both argument and collaboration. Their argument is based on their respective academic views, the diversity of which prevents the establishment of unilateral discourse and objectively presents diversified theories in the critical community of Chinese fine arts. Their collaboration is based on their common faith in Chinese contemporary art. Therefore, they have brought us a quite different nomination exhibition featuring self-possession, rationality, vitality and intimacy, as indicated by its name of“Youth at Upstairs”.
The cooperation between Times Art Museum and these young critics to find and promote the most lively artistic works in modern China and invite 46 representative young artists to the exhibition not only proves the museum's consistent support to the development of pioneering art, but also achieves its social responsibility. We are convinced that such effective cooperation will be increasingly important in the museum's future work.
inally, on behalf of Beijing Times Art Museum, 1 would like to extend my sincere gratitude to all critics, artists and the staff who worked hard for this exhibition, and to Guardian Online that funded this exhibition. It is their generous sponsorship that secures the nonprofit academic quality of this exhibition.
