c-ART-sh

We all said China’s art scene is market- oriented, just see how people describe 798 factory, (the former Bauhaus industrial area, now an art district) has become an art supermarket and look at how painter Liu Xiaodong’ s 3m x 10m “Three Gorges New Immigrants” ended up being sold at RMB 22 million at Poly art auction (although the artist claimed that his hyper- expensive painting has been made to a tool for making hot money and should cost less that RMB 10 million) We know that it’s all linked with money, and most people agree with this, this is a linear conclusion from the art trends (if you believe that art scene is a market) in the Middle Kingdom. Instead of creating art that makes money, some people do it in a reverse way, which is, making art with money.

Chinese artist Liang Kegang uses one million yuan genuine banknotes to create his work “One Million”. The 10, 000 hundred kuai banknotes are divided into 100 wads, and then placed on a wall as a collage, with ten wads on each side. The physical heaviness of the notes creates problems for the gallery staffs in setting up, they kept falling off from the wall. The artist said he would sell the work at the price of RMB 1.2 to 1.3 million.

Before pushing you into a debate of the relations between art and capitalism, this 1.14m x 1,8m piece raises the abstractness of the concept of money, numbers on the tags of your H & M shirt, shining digitals on ATM screen, or, “material of a general material of contracts”. The tangibility of banknotes sparks off a rethinking process on people’s superstition and dependence on monetary numbers in the e- banking era. Also the hot argument on this work reveals the widely- shared established concept of the contrariety between art/ intellectually and business/ money in China’s (or actually other country) tradition that can be dated back to the Shi (Chinese intellectuals)’s despise on money in ancient times. This thought can be shown on some viewers’ comment: “it’s a shame”. Well, what kind of shame it is? The shame of being absorbed or affected by a establishment? So how about the art-pieces being absorbed by some “spiritual” establishment like politics, philosophy or psychology, which all result in weakening the intuitive/ phenomenological power, which make art to be art but not something else, released from a piece?

This work, which is monetarily expensive before any artistic value is added to the piece, can be compared with British artist Damien Hirst (you know, the shark pickler) ‘s work “For the Love of God”, a platinum life- size human skull encrusted with 8, 601 fine diamonds. Both of them cast materialistic heaviness, on, something like death, or, your and my hands.