[url]http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/02/21/magazine/20070225_CHINA_SLIDESHOW_1.html
xu zhen....
Song Chao
Pi Li In a city with hundreds of galleries but no real gallerists, the curator Pi Li (photographed with the work of the artist Liu Wei, whose solo show he is mounting this spring) is best positioned to build the artistic careers that will keep Chinese contemporary art aloft after the first bubble bursts. Pi, 32, presides over UniversalStudios-Beijing (don’t tell Hollywood), a 13,000-square-foot hangarlike space with a commercial program representing China’s hippest artists, a production arm responsible for things like the Chinese pavilion at the Venice Biennale this summer and even a noodle bar cum summer hangout. Born into the official Chinese art world — his father is the influential critic Pi Daojian — he made a name for himself in the ’90s writing about the painters who are now commanding big dollars at international auctions. And his influence as the curatorial don of the Deng Xiaoping generation only continues to expand — from the karaoke nightclubs, where he regularly convenes gatherings of artists, actors and media folk, to the offices of UBS, which recently named him one of two advisers worldwide to its corporate collection.
Song Chao
Fan Di’an The director of the National Art Museum of China, Fan Di’an is perhaps the only cultural bureaucrat who seems to value a designer haircut and a well-fitting suit. A prominent critic and educator in the 1990s and former vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he was once tapped by the Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin to deliver a crash course in modern Western art on the eve of a presidential visit to the Pompidou. Since his appointment to the nation’s premier venue in 2005, Fan has expanded the museum’s program — official shows sponsored by sanctioned ‘‘artists’ associations’’ and, increasingly, corporate-sponsored vanity exhibitions — by collaborating with international-art-world institutions like Art Basel (for which he held a panel and party in the museum’s atrium last September) and the Guggenheim (whose blockbuster ‘‘Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation’’ opened there earlier this month). A member of the city’s Olympic Committee who is widely seen as destined for higher office, he will most likely face the onerous task of legitimizing contemporary art in the eyes of the state.
Song Chao
Ou Ning and Cao Fei Working over the last several years from the ‘‘Alternative Archive,’’ a townhouse in their native Guangzhou, Ou Ning emerged as the éminence grise of China’s burgeoning graphic-design and alternative-media scene and Cao Fei became a globe-trotting young artist (she is 28) on the biennial circuit. He is a catalyst and mentor for the creative class, galvanizing a group of young designers, filmmakers and musicians with traveling exhibitions like ‘‘Get It Louder’’ and special supplements (on topics like Art Basel) to the chic Chinese publication Modern Weekly. She devotes herself to the young and the disenfranchised in video works like ‘‘Whose Utopia?’’ a collaboration with migrant workers at a Siemens light-bulb factory in Foshan. Together they have documented China’s rapidly regenerating cities in strangely lyrical urban research projects about Sanyuanli (a migrant neighborhood in Guangzhou) and Dazhalan (a poor enclave in Beijing’s old city). Last summer, this one true power couple of the Chinese art world made a surprise move from Guangzhou to Beijing, trading local prominence for a perch in the capital. You can read more about their comings and goings on their matching blogs on alternativearchive.com.
Song Chao
Guan Yi Standing in front of Huang Yong Ping’s sculpture ‘‘Factory of the World’’ at a temporary exhibition in the grand Soviet-style halls of Beijing’s Agricultural Exhibition Center in the fall of 2002, Guan Yi decided to become an art collector. The son of a wealthy chemical-manufacturing magnate, he has amassed in a few years an impressive trove at once sophisticated and adamantly Chinese. While he does own a few works by auction darlings like Zhang Xiaogang and Wang Guangyi, Guan Yi’s passion lies not with the painters but with the experimental collectives — Huang’s Xiamen Dada, Wu Shanzhuan’s Red Humor, Gu Dexin’s New Analysts and the Guangzhou-based Big Tail Elephant Group — who are the real art heroes of the last two decades. And while a stop at the private museum (photographed here) has become de rigueur for every group of visiting art-world dignitaries, his most important role may be figurehead and tastemaker for the emerging generation of Chinese collectors, who, if they follow his lead, may help turn Chinese art history away from the smiling faces and remade propaganda posters of the current buzz.
Song Chao
Xu Zhen The merry prankster of Shanghai, Xu Zhen makes slyly provocative art out of the foibles of the party state. When a team of Chinese mountaineers revised the official height of Mount Everest in 2005, lowering it by four meters, he produced an elaborate ‘‘documentary’’ of himself scaling the summit with a group of friends and then displayed the mountaineering paraphernalia from this Photoshopped expedition — along with a papier-mâché pyramid purported to be Everest’s missing peak. For the Shanghai Biennale in 2004, he sped up the clock atop the British Racing Club building (which now houses the Shanghai Art Museum) so that during the exhibition the hours passed in mere seconds. His piece ‘‘OKmyclub’’ (shown here) took the form of a widely forwarded e-mail message that solicited funding for him and a gang of thugs to travel around the world ‘‘beating up’’ celebrities and politicians. He now oversees a curatorial space in Shanghai’s Moganshan gallery district as well as an online community populated by young Chinese hipsters.
Song Chao
Hou Hanru Hou Hanru’s landmark ‘‘Cities on the Move’’ (1997), a sprawling manifesto of a show that Hou organized with the Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, brought many Chinese — but also Thai, Korean and Indonesian — artists into the global mainstream. In 1999, Hou found himself in the spotlight when he became the first foreigner to curate the French pavilion at Venice and then went on to direct the first international biennial on Chinese soil in Shanghai in 2000. He and Obrist reunited to organize the second Guangzhou Triennial in his native Pearl River Delta (the region that includes Guangzhou and Hong Kong) from 2004 to 2006. At Venice this summer, his Chinese pavilion will show the work of four female artists, and his Istanbul Biennial exhibition — orga
真事儿！
顶！
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