Art Basel in Hong Kong 2015

The Met launches China show, using a Western lens
Feature
The Met launches China show, using a Western lens
05 May 2015

After the gala and serious fundraising, Costume Institute and Asian art department
join forces to celebrate real and imaginary China
by Julia Michalska
The expat effect: many early adopters of the Hong Kong fair were born elsewhere
Analysis
The expat effect: many early adopters of the Hong Kong fair were born elsewhere
22 April 2015

Dubai’s art fair also harnesses the interest of the city’s cosmopolitan inhabitants
by Melanie Gerlis
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by Gareth Harris
Seeking out Southeast Asia
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As curatorial interest in the region grows, will more collectors follow?
by Georgina Adam
China survey along the Rhine
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The Met launches China show, using a Western lens

After the gala and serious fundraising, Costume Institute and Asian art department join forces
to celebrate real and imaginary China
by Julia Michalska | 5 May 2015
The Met launches China show, using a Western lens
A view of the costumes on display at "China: Through The Looking Glass" at the Met's Costume
Institute. Photo: Rob Kim/FilmMagic
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China is a political and economic superpower, but a fashion exhibition in New York argues that
the country’s most pervasive influence may be artistic. “The length and breadth of the West’s
engagement with China is quite surprising. It goes right back
to the Roman empire, with the opening of the Silk Route, through to the height of chinoiserie
in the 17th and 18th centuries,” says Andrew Bolton, the
curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

While celebrities wearing Asian-inspired haute couture, including co-host Anna Wintour, Sarah
Jessica Parker and Lady Gaga, lined up on the red carpet Monday night to preview “China:
through the Looking Glass”, the Costume Institute’s show opens to
the public on 7 May (until 16 August). It juxtaposes contemporary Western fashion with Chinese
decorative art, costumes and films, showing the influence of
China on Western designers such as Tom Ford, Alexander McQueen, Karl Lagerfeld and John Galliano.
The Met also held a press preview of the high-profile show in
the Forbidden Palace in January. Thomas Campbell, the museum’s director, travelled to Beijing
for the event, at which Shan Jixiang, the director of the
Palace Museum, said he looked forward to further collaborations between the two institutions.

Bolton says: “Most designers aren’t looking at the real China. Rather, they’re looking at
a China that already existed in their imagination.” This idea is reflected in the titl
e of the show. “It’s my metaphor for the designers who reach out to
China through the lens of their minds. The designs are never intended as a facsimile of
the original garment or the original object,” the curator says.

Maxwell Hearn, the director of the museum’s Asian art department, hopes that the Costume
Institute’s China exhibition brings “a whole new audience” into the Asian wing of the Met.
The Asian art department, which is collaborating on the show, is
celebrating its centennial this year, with 17 exhibitions in total. The programme includes
a Japanese art exhibition in the spring and a Chinese painting show
in the autumn.

Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Chinese-American star, in “Daughter of the Dragon”, 1931.
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Paramount/The Kobal Collection
Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Chinese-American star, in “Daughter of the Dragon”, 1931.
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Paramount/The Kobal Collection

Several films by Western and Chinese directors will be shown as part of “Through the Looking
Glass”, to put the designs in context. Wong Kar-wai, the prominent Hong Kong-based film-maker,
is the exhibition’s artistic director. His productions
include “In the Mood for Love”, 2000, “My Blueberry Nights”, 2007, and “The Grandmaster”,
2013. The show aims to convey how cinema has been one of the main
lenses through which fashion designers in the West have “discovered” China.

An important premise of the exhibition is the idea that the West’s fantastical interpretations
of China can exist in their own right, rather than as mere approximations of Chinese culture.
So the show aims to readdress Edward Said’s notion
of Orientalism—a criticism of the West’s depictions of the East as patronising and
inauthentic. “These designers had the intention of creating a fantasy.
The iconographies they use have become signifying motifs of China, and they are ones
that both Western and Chinese designers gravitate towards. They are sartorial
shorthand for China itself,” Bolton says.

The exhibition is organised around three epochs—Imperial China, the Republic of China and
the People’s Republic of China—and each is represented by a garment that has inspired designers.

The dragon robe, worn by emperors in Beijing’s Forbidden City, signifies Imperial China.
Bolton says: “Designers are often inspired by the iconography of the robe, the waves and
mountains of the hem, but also the other motifs from the front and back:
the dragons, the clouds and the bats.” This section includes what Bolton describes as the
“holy grail” of the show: a yellow sequined dress designed by
Tom Ford for Yves Saint Laurent in 2004—part of his last collection for the fashion house.
The dress was a homage to Saint Laurent’s 1977 China-inspired collection
(its imagery, rather than its silhouette, is based on the dragon robe).

The qipao, the body-hugging dress worn by Chinese women in the 1920s, represents the period
of the Republic of China (1912-49). It evolved from the Manchu robe, the chang shan, on
which the dragon robe is based. Bolton says that the qipao became
the “sartorial symbol” of nationalist China and was popularised by actresses, known as
“calendar girls”, in films and advertising. It was a sign of “women’s
increasing emancipation”—equivalent to the flapper dress.

The show’s foremost example of a Western design inspired by the qipao is a bright red dress
that John Galliano designed for Dior in 1997, to reflect the handover of Hong Kong to China
that year.

Unsurprisingly, the Mao suit, a utilitarian tunic ensemble, evokes Communist China. The show
includes examples from Chanel’s capsule collection “Shanghai-Paris”, which was presented in
China two years ago.

Collecting Asian art
Hearn says that, technically, the Met’s collection of Asian art existed before the department
was founded in 1915, because private Asian collections had already entered the museum. However,
it was not until the 1970s, when the Met “rededicated
itself to being an encyclopaedic museum”, that it recognised that its Asian art department
needed to be strengthened and “could not be allowed to atrophy”,
he says. The department now has 53 galleries and boasts one of the world’s most comprehensive
Asian art collections. In the past four decades, the department
has published more than 90 catalogues devoted to Asian art, which is a “really important
part of the Met’s contribution”, Hearn says.

Around 90% of the Asian art collection has come as gifts from major collectors, mostly in
the New York area, such as the Rockefellers, the Havemeyers, J.P. Morgan and Otto Kahn,
according to Hearn. Indeed, one of the highlights of the anniversary
programme will be a show in the autumn “celebrating a major collection that we’re
anticipating coming our way”, he says.

“China: through the Looking Glass” is sponsored by Yahoo, Condé Nast and several Chinese
donors; Adrian Cheng, the founder of the K11 Art Foundation, has supported the opening
concert.

A Passion for Jade”: 100 pieces from the Heber Bishop Collection

The industrialist and Met trustee Heber Bishop bequeathed his collection of more than
1,000 pieces of jade and other hardstone to the museum in 1902. The objects, which range
from everyday items to Imperial artefacts, date from the Han Dynasty
to the 20th century. The exhibition, running until 19 June, features around 100 carvings
from Bishop’s collection, which Maxwell Hearn, the director of the
museum’s Asian art department, describes as “a time capsule of the kind of collecting
that was in vogue at that time”. The show forms part of the department’s
centenary celebrations
by Melanie Gerlis http://theartnewspaper.com/reports/ABHK_2015/
The expat effect: many early adopters of the Hong Kong fair were born elsewhere
Expat communities—whose members are generally higher-earning and have more disposable income
than cities’ longer-term residents—have proved instrumental in helping cultural initiatives to
get off the ground in Hong Kong and other cities around the

world. “Expats were very important to the early days of ArtHK [now Art Basel in Hong Kong],”
says its co-founder Tim Etchells, who is also the co-founder of
the new satellite contemporary art fair Art Central (14-16 March).

This is despite the fact that only around 7% of Hong Kong’s population is recorded as “born
elsewhere” (outside Hong Kong or mainland China), according to the most recent census. This
percentage is growing, however, and expats seem more dominant among the
culturally curious, not least because they tend to stick together socially. HSBC’s Expat Explorer
Report 2014 found that 65% of surveyed expats in Hong
Kong go out with each other more often than with local friends, compared with a global average
of 44%. Etchells says that his team “littered” Hong Kong’s expat
haunts with tickets to the launch of ArtHK in 2008, contributing to the 9,000 people who turned
up to its vernissage. “They would go to the opening
of an envelope,” he says, only half joking.

TyHoa Kobler is a financier who has lived in Hong Kong for ten years, as well as in New York
and London, and describes herself as a “collector rather than a Collector”. She has followed
the scene closely and says: “With the arrival of outposts of the
major London- and New York-based galleries in recent years, and a number of expat curators,
including Lars Nittve [the Swedish-born director of Hong Kong’s M+
museum], there is a strong international flavour to the art market.” However, “although Hong
Kong has a vibrant expat community, it is a very Chinese city,
so expat collectors based here are also a small minority”, she says.

Staying on
The question for cities with such an international vibe is: when does an “expat” term end and
“non-national residency” begin? The in-and-out mentality of Hong Kong is less pronounced now
that its relative financial prosperity seems not only to attract those
fr om overseas, but to keep them in the city. “Visitors” can quickly get hooked on higher salaries,
better job prospects and an improved standard of living,
often with homes, childcare and schooling paid for; plus there is less tax to pay. “The quality of
life is very good,” says the French art dealer Edouard
Malingue (3C10), who moved to Hong Kong in 2010. He is learning Cantonese and, at the time of
this interview, was looking forward to the birth of his
second child. “My long-term plan is to stay,” he says.

Such growing integration compares with other expat hangouts, such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United
Arab Emirates (UAE). There, more than 80% of the population is expats or non-national residents.
Antonia Carver, the director of Art Dubai (18-21 March),
says that it is not about where people are from, but “who has a commitment in terms of setting up their
business and building their homes and relationships
in the UAE”.

Of Dubai, Carver says: “It’s a city that is secure [politically], when all around is generally not
experiencing the same environment, so it can attract important collectors from the Middle East and
South Asia who really live here.” She cites Mohammed
Afkhami and Ramin Salsali (both originally from Iran and on her fair’s board of patrons; Salsali
founded a private museum in Dubai in 2011).

A more recent phenomenon, Carver says, is for artists from less stable countries—including Iran,
Pakistan, Lebanon and Syria—to make the UAE their home, contributing to the development of “a
more mature cultural environment”.

Who needs a home?
Increasingly, it is not just people who are making their homes in new countries who affect the
cultural scene. Malingue says: “You don’t have to live somewh ere 24/7 to be part of the community.”
His biggest buyers are “[Chinese] mainlanders who have
either an offshore account or part of their business in Hong Kong. They get on planes as often
as we go on the subway and contribute significantly to Hong
Kong’s economic and cultural life.”

Carver sees the same effect, albeit from more quarters, in Dubai. “Throughout the year, so many
people now come through and stop for a day or two,” she says. This means that this year’s new
timing for Art Basel in Hong Kong, which ends as her fair begins, is a
“no-brainer” for many Western visitors, happy to stop off in Dubai on their way home.