LOS ANGELES � Let others talk about the lure of art from China. James Elaine did something or so it. He moved there.
"China is hither to bide," says Elaine, an artist and conservator who has organized high-strung exhibitions and introduced rising figures at Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, for the past tense decade. "The culture, the art world, it's non a furore of the West that's going to fade away. China is a power."
With the help of a grant from the Asian Cultural Council � and the boom of the 2008 Ordway Prize, a $100,000 award for midcareer artists, curators and art writers � he has traded his Hammer "curator" championship for "adjunct curator" and taken himself to China, where he plans to stay two years.
The goal is to learn more than about artistic production being made throughout the vast area and research possibilities of exhibitions and exchange programs for the museum and the university. He spends about half his prison term working for the Hammer, the perch pursuing main projects.
"I want to be a bridge," Elaine says. "I think there are a lot of opportunities to get together and better half for a long time ahead."
His jeopardize is a bold move, for him and the university, simply it reflects an escalating interest in Chinese present-day art that goes well beyond Beijing Olympics fever.
At the moment, Elaine is back in Los Angeles for his first Chinese show, an installation by Sun Xun that's share of the Hammer Projects series and runs through Oct 12.
Inspired by a 1914 bilingual book, "The New China," Sun � a 28-year-old artist wHO lives in Hangzhou and founded an animation studio in 2006 � has explored changing notions of China's evolution in wall paintings and an animated film.
"I do see in this new generation, a new kind of nontextual matter being made," Elaine says. "Maybe not new to the world, but sure enough new to China. The first wave was political pop, more than direct and obvious work. I'm eyesight a much more introverted, emotional, psychological, sexual type of work, people investigating themselves and their identity. Sun Xun is asking identity questions about his country, where it came from, where it's departure and the world's perceptions."
From East to West
This season, Chinese fine art seems to be all over. A snap of the global nontextual matter calendar is filled with Chinese offerings:
In Paris, the big summertime show at the Musee Maillol (web.museemaillol.com), featuring works by 35 artists, has an Olympics theme, "China Gold."
This fall's attraction at the Asia Society (world Wide Web.asiasociety.org) in New York is "Art and China's Revolution."
In London, the Saatchi Gallery (www.rizzoliusa.com) is touting its Chinese solicitation with a profusely illustrated book, "The Revolution Continues: New Art From China."
California is rich territory for young artists from China.
In Los Angeles, in addition to the Hammer demo, three galleries (DNJ Gallery, DF2 and Morono Kiang Gallery) are showing photography and paintings from China.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (www.sfmoma.org) recently opened "Half-Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art From the Logan Collection," featuring 50 paintings, sculptures and installations of external contemporary art.
And the fall exhibition at Berkeley Art Museum (web.bampfa.berkeley.edu) is "Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art From the Sigg Collection," a travelling exhibition showcasing the work of nigh 100 artists from the collection of Uli Sigg, a Swiss businessman and former diplomatist who fatigued many days in China.
All this art represents the tumultuous growth that has transpired since the Cultural Revolution over in 1976.
Initially, artists had to run to the West to gain realisation and realize a living. And the government crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989 brought new restrictions. But today it's possible for van artists to flourish at home and � for a few � to become wealthy.
The market for contemporary Chinese art has boomed, with a big push from Christie's and Sotheby's auction bridge houses. Paintings of Chinese people looking for stressed, low and hysterical by artists such as Zhang Xiaogang, Liu Xiaodong, Yue Minjun and Zeng Fanzhi take brought $2 million to $9 million at auction.
"The market is shifting," Elaine says. "A whole modern generation is coming up with a new imaginativeness. Ten or 15 years ago, some of these artists didn't have a penny. Now they ar wealthier than I will ever be. Young people see that you potty be an artist in China. You can be respected, you can make lots of money and you don't have to do traditional Chinese landscape painting."
Critics and criticism
Not everyone embraces the art gushing out of China.
New Republic critic Jed Perl darned the new Saatchi Gallery publication as "the most hateful art book promulgated in my lifetime" and condemned some of the artists for "getting comfortable with Mao (Zedong)" and rehabilitating his atrocities in their work.
Jeff Kelley, an expert in Chinese modern-day art wHO curated the Logan aggregation exhibition at SFMoMA, takes a more than nuanced perspective in his catalog essay. Art thought to represent a yellow reaction to rampant consumerism or administration control, he contends, "has revealed itself to be more psychologically resonant than the facade of pop iconoclasm and gestures of ironic insulation might pronto suggest."
The masklike visages so frequently painted may not expose the artists' souls, he writes, but they "re-enact the psychic aftermath of an era in which representations of specific human emotions were replaced with the idealized faces of the Revolution."
What whitney Young artists ar doing is another write up, as the Chinese exhibitions reveal. The photographers at DNJ Gallery shoot pictures of people riding trains and bicycles, panoramas of streets, portraits of miners, dwellings in an antediluvian farming community.
"As the culture changes, you see the subject affair changing," Elaine says. "You see what is genuinely real and what's happening."
A native of Dallas whose mother was born in China, the daughter of American missionaries, Elaine has spent several years encyclopaedism to verbalise, read and write Chinese. But he didn't go to China until 2002, with his family.
"When I came back to L.A. from that trip, I was just full of passion and fire," he says. "I had to learn the language. It was near frenetic. I didn't know why I was doing it. I just had to. When I came to Los Angeles 10 years agone, I view it was the Wild West. Now China is the Wild West. I love it."
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