ShContemporary Serves Up Asian Match Point
News / Shanghai
By Andrew Maerkle

On the morning of September 5, the Shanghai Exhibition Center hardly looked ready for a major international event, as teams of workmen made last minute adjustments to exhibitors’ booths or pushed crates to and fro across the Stalinist building’s marble floors. Yet by 6 o’clock that evening, the inaugural ShContemporary art fair got off to a relatively smooth start (see AAP 55). An initiative of the Italian trade show organizers BolognaFiere and directed by the team of Pierre Huber and Lorenzo Rudolf, ShContemporary is the first such event to bring together leading galleries from the US and Europe alongside their counterparts from Asia, many of whom are consistently overlooked by leading international fairs such as ArtBasel or frieze.

The mood of the exhibitors over the next few days was positive. China-focused galleries such as Max Protetch, Urs Meile and Alexander Ochs performed strongly, while newly established Japanese gallery ARATANIURANO surprised by selling out its booth of paintings by Venice Biennale participant Izumi Kato shortly after the opening. New York dealer Thomas Erben had strong sales for his Indian, Pakistani and Korean artists. Tang Contemporary, with spaces in Bangkok and Beijing, featured an impressive Rirkrit Tiravanija (see AAP Vol. 3, No. 2; 37, 43, 51 & Almanac 1, 2) installation, Rich Bastards Beware—a room-sized container of jasmine rice grains obscuring an eponymous text painting—that sold to Miami real-estate developer Craig Robins for just under a quarter-million dollars.

Although few other US and European celebrity collectors made the trip East, Asian buyers made a splash. James Cohan Gallery placed an anthropomorphic Nam June Paik (see AAP Vol. 3, No. 3; 29, 41, 49) installation of stacked TV screens priced at USD 450,000 and a $260,000 Bill Viola video with a Taiwanese collector. Tomio Koyama also found a cross-straits home for a group of oversize Yoshitomo Nara (see AAP 29, 39, 41, 52) sculptures. Most dealers reported earning back expenses, and even those that did not perform to expectations plan on returning for a second year.

However, censorship was an issue. Galleria Continua, San Gimignano – Beijing, had planned to show a Buddha figure from South African artist Kendell Geers’ “Losing My Religion” series of sculptures, but the work did not pass the preliminary censor board. At the fair, Continua displayed the work enclosed in a crate as well as a roughly-scrawled sign in Chinese and English explaining that the work had been censored. The sign made it through the opening night but on a subsequent inspection censors made the gallery remove it. Also of note, censors required that pages of this magazine (AAP 55) be cut out by hand in order to meet decency standards. Offending images included those of a Shi Xinning painting of a benevolent Mao Zedong observing the seminal performance piece To Raise an Anonymous Mountain by a Meter (p. 87), a Yan Pei-Ming double portrait of Mao with the last emperor Pu Yi (p. 130) and Takashi Murakami’s Lonesome Cowboy, a sculpture of a masturbating nude male figure ejaculating a lasso of semen (p. 138).

Yet during the final hours of the closing day, as fair director Lorenzo Rudolf made the rounds to personally thank each exhibitor for participating, it was apparent that ShContemporary struck a nerve with regional dealers, many of whom used the week to forge new lateral business relationships. Provided the fair receives support from Shanghai city officials for a follow-up edition, ShContemporary will look to capitalize on the convergence of Asian art festivals including the Gwangju, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney and Taipei biennials and Yokohama Triennale in 2008.