798 District Blog

BEIJING—Hearing that an artist has made work out of panda feces, one can quickly think of a few possible suspects: panda-mad Rob Pruitt perhaps, or Chris Ofili, who has used elephant dung in past works. Even Piero Manzoni, who famously canned his own excrement, seems a possible culprit. However, it turns out that Chinese artist Zhao Bandi is, in fact, the man responsible, and that these new works are only the latest (and dirtiest) work stemming from his ongoing artistic fascination with pandas.

Although several years ago he mounted a pitched campaign against the public screening of the “Kung Fu Panda” movie in China, petitioning the central government’s bureau of broadcasting on the grounds that it was an insulting misappropriation of a precious Chinese cultural symbol, his own use of China’s beloved bear has brought a hail of criticism down on his own head. His “haute couture” panda works have drawn on a dizzying array of Chinese types — construction workers and stock brokers, hostesses and sex workers, beggars and gays — for inspiration and have created public furor and widespread animosity on the grounds that his work was insulted and injured China’s self-respect.

In spite of his seeming indifference to public opinion, he has recently embraced philanthropy and held a series of auctions of his work in aid of his favorite charity, which supports old people’s homes on the banks of the Yellow River.

Read full article:

An Exhibition and a Conference

The art market is engaged in the delicate non-science of attaching prices to works of art. It is a process of making something as intangible as art into something as clearly defined as a numerical value. Everyone in the art world is somehow involved in this process, from critics to museums, galleries, collectors and auction houses. A massive network of knowledge and experience goes into creating a delicate balance between the artistic value and commercial value of contemporary art, but the peaks and troughs of the market every now and again throws everything into doubt. The contemporary art market is now larger than it has ever been in history, and the recent crisis is forcing new art markets to face this question for the first time. The advent of modernism and the ideas that drove the artistic evolution from traditional to modern to contemporary has been a constant challenge to the idea of what artistic value actually is. The so-called art establishment that traditionally pronounced on value has been changing and expanding to the extent that it’s now almost impossible to define. In the last two decades with the development of globalization, cultures all over the world with different artistic traditions have been brought into the contemporary dialogue, bringing new and more complex perspectives on the debate about value, which has rarely been questioned within a commercial context.

Read the full article