By Mark Godfrey

　　Following fast on the re-launch of National Art Museum of China, this autumn's Beijing International Art Biennale could prove the decisive push the local art scene needs towards the maturity and confidence of its international peers.

　　One of my first impressions of Beijing is of walking on Wangfujing and being inundated by invitations to art exhibitions. The exhibitions were generally not so much exhibitions as poky shops selling reprints of better known Chinese originals. But the phenomenon did do something to highlight the apparent absence of spaces for showing art, and particularly modern art, in China's capital. The nation's traditional xuan style of paper and ink painting has been sidelined by younger artists' abstract creations on canvas.

　　Another Western journalist put it well recently when he wrote of Beijing: "...there are still certain sectors of town, particularly on the east side, where one can hardly spit without hitting an avant-garde Chinese artist." China's younger artists are producing a phenomenal amount of diverse and exciting work. Compared to European cities, galleries in Beijing and the other major Chinese societies take some finding. The newly opened National Museum of Fine Arts (now renamed National Art Museum of China, NAMOC) in Beijing stands out, but the capital's other galleries are sometimes obscure by comparison. Art enthusiasts have, however, been managing to track down places like the Red Gate Gallery at the Dongbianmen Watchtower in Chongwen District and the Beijing Tokyo Art Projects in the newly revitalised 798 art district.

　　Expansion of exhibition space aside however, China's market for modern art remains seriously underdeveloped. Lack of audiences, lack of funding, and a major shortfall in infrastructure are the three problems most seriously besetting the nation's art scene. The lonely corridors of the Museum of Fine Arts on the Saturday we visited compare poorly with the people-jammed streets and corridors of Xidan or Wangfujing, two of Beijing's most popular shopping districts.

　　"China's art scene is maybe just not visible enough," according to Beijing-based accountant and art collector Wayne Stewart. "There's undoubtedly a lot of talent but it's not exactly easy to find. You don't associate any place in particular with art in Beijing. The art scene is at a fresh, exciting stage but it's difficult for Western visitors to the city who are used to having several prestigious art galleries as central attractions in the city centre." A US native, Stewart has purchased several pieces of art in Beijing and Shanghai. Some are hanging in his Beijing apartment. Others he has shipped to friends and business partners in Europe and the US. "A lot of art currently available here would fit very well in corporate environments or private homes in the west. Oriental art will always be popular. But in Beijing the pieces are, comparatively speaking, so cheap so it's so much easier to form collections."

　　The freshly renovated National Art Museum of China is a Chinese style building currently housing some very Western art forms. Opened in 1973, the museum has evolved from being a showcase for establishment-approved art to being a gallery that also welcomes the avant-garde. NAMOC's partner institution in developing the notion of state-funded embrace of modern art, the China Millennium Monument Art Museum has hosted exhibitions of Chinese and foreign artworks and joined NAMOC in co-hosting this year's Beijing Biennale.

　　While Chinese canvases are becoming popular acquisitions on Western art markets, local installation art has begun to draw a great deal of international attention and often posits probing questions. Artist and part-time lecturer Zhang Xiaotao for example creates philosophical works from kitchen waste. Who's Shell Is It? is, according to the artist, a representation of the gluttony and greed he's seen in Beijing. Zhang regularly criticises what he sees as the material excesses of modern society. In another oeuvre, Zhang exhibited a mouldy birthday cake he discovered in his fridge as a representation of "...the sudden turns for the worse in life."

　　Peng Yu's Civilisation Pillar meanwhile is a four-metre high pillar made of the human fat she collected from hospitals and liposuction clinics around Beijing. A graduate of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Peng told journalists she believed "...that material surplus is a fundamental condition for the development of society and art. For instance, have you noticed that there are few fat people in a poor country and many fat people in a wealthy country? Fat people are a civilised people and those who undergo liposuction are trying to be even more so." The fat in Civilisation Pillar has a dual symbolism, according to 29 year old Peng. "It represents wealth as well as something we cast off in order to pursue civilisation." Good art should shock people says Peng, who works in the Dashanzi/798 art district. "The materials I choose to convey my ideas are usually quite controversial. Hopefully, people who see my art will be moved to think about what art is and how one's own taboos and morals are related to that."

　　Conversion of decrepit industrial buildings to houses of art happens in Beijing too. Here it takes the form of the 798 zone of abandoned machine turning factories now morphing into galleries, studios and bars. Art galleries in traditionally industrial areas have proved remarkably successful in other world cities - the Tate Modern in London springs to mind. Much of the 798 art district so far, however, appears to suffer from a paralysis of development, with little in the way of new galleries opening and an often limited amount of actually visible artistic activity.

　　Art appears at times to be secondary in profile and importance to the bars and clubs moving fast onto the scene.

　　If it does work out, the 798 district will be an example of intelligent urban regeneration - of Beijing's development without demolition and destruction of the original buildings.

　　Next-door to 798 the impressive Yan Club is managed by Li Xue Bing. "Bing Bing" to her friends, impresario Li Xue has turned a factory hall into what's now a multi-purpose arts venue and one of the most respected names associated with Beijing's performing arts scene. Maintaining its original glass-roofed Bauhaus appearance, the Yan Club has been tastefully converted into a venue that easily metamorphoses between art gallery and concert hall. "China needs a new face," claims Bing Bing. "There has to be new ways of self-expression and we need more excitement amidst all the seriousness. I want this venue to make people excited" she enthuses somewhat vaguely. Interaction, not passive gallery observation, is her watchword. Certainly her concept offers the sort of freshness any city with cultural pretensions positively needs.

　　The growing profile of Chinese contemporary art in the West has made it possible - and sometimes lucrative ?for a number of small, privately-owned art galleries to pop up across Beijing. The oldest of these galleries is the Red Gate Gallery. Run by Australian curator Brian Wallace, the Red Gate opened in 1991 in the old Watchtower Building at Dongbianmen. With some collaboration with the Australian embassy, Wallace's gallery has come to specialise in contemporary works by mainland Chinese artists and Chinese artists living abroad, while also bringing some of Australia's cutting-edge art to Beijing. Many of the Red Gate's regular exhibitors graduated from China's major art academies, including celebrated painters Su Xinping and Wang Yuping, as well as young and promising figurative artists like He Sen.

　　His recent series Girl. Toy. Smoke is He Sen's stunning study of the human condition, executed in his trade mark pinks and bubble-gum blues. "My works are a description of the anxieties of puberty and how escape feels," he said at a public talk in the gallery. "My paintings evoke a lost child in the street - left to confront reality, left with a sense of unimaginable terror. We try to be tough with ourselves, but it all falls apart. That's the reality of our lives." He Sen's paintings are searching and haunting, very strong on visual emotion but nearer in style to Pop Art than Realism.

　　Another popular exhibitor at the Red Gate Gallery, Shen Ling's solo exhibition showcases the sombre neo-Expressionistic work of this talented painter whose creations seem to push the boundaries of traditional Chinese takes on love and relationships. Browns and pinks are a common theme throughout the work but rarely has an exploration of art's most trusty muse ever been so searching.

　　Specialising in Chinese avant-garde art is the equally impressive Courtyard Gallery. Located on the East Gate moat of the Forbidden City, the Courtyard is perhaps the best example of a particularly popular style of showing art in Beijing: the gallery-restaurant. A renovated traditional-style Chinese house with a cigar divan, the Courtyard offers five-star Western dining upstairs, with an extensive gallery downstairs. The Courtyard regularly presents conceptual and abstract works, often in series form. Exhibitors have included Beijing graffiti artist Zhang Dali and photographer Zhuang Hui's photos from the city's public baths. One of the most popular exhibits at the Courtyard has been Zhuang's Ten Years, a collection of his brilliant-colour "souvenir shots" of banal and everyday Chinese scenes.

　　Just a stroll away from the Courtyard, the Wan Fung Gallery, likewise is a good space to see exhibitions that are often sponsored and organised by the artists themselves, local Chinese and foreigners alike. Exhibiting at the Wan Fung Gallery earlier this year under the title Preserve Our Hutongs, Kuang Han is probably best known for his paintings of Beijing hutongs and street life. Born in Jiangxi province, Kuang graduated from Nanjing Normal University with a degree in Traditional Chinese painting. Since the mid 1990s, when the construction of apartment blocks destroyed many traditional hutongs, Kuang Han took to drawing the old buildings as a mission as much as an art project, racing the bulldozers to hutongs condemned to history with one simple painted character that said "to be demolished."

　　It's perhaps indicative of the position of the arts in China that no arts or entertainment companies have made it into the list of China's leading enterprises. From 2001-05, China's government will spend more on building libraries and cultural centres in underdeveloped regions. China will speed up the development of the arts and entertainment sector, said Vice-Minister of Culture Li Yuanchao recently. More investment in the form of private capital or equity funding will, said Li, supplement government funding for movies, magazines, art trading and education. Statistics published by the Culture Ministry show that urban residents spent only 2.35 per cent of their total incomes on cultural activities in 1997.

　　According to Kuiyi Shen, assistant professor of Chinese and Japanese art at Ohio University in the United States, China's switch to a market economy has seen government involvement in the arts diminish, with the result of more international investment in China's art scene. "...Artists now earn money from anywhere they can find it. More and more Westerners are buying from the artists. It's very interesting that the funding cut actually opened the door to the artist and to the patron."

　　Adequate state funding is however essential to a thriving arts scene, according to art academic and renowned abstract painter Power Boothe. "The market system does not support developing talent. The market only backs what it thinks is a sure thing. We need government funding of the arts."

　　Private money is pouring fast into China's art scene, says Beijing-based art enthusiast Tzyy Wang. But, she believes, more public funding is needed to improve exhibition space and promotion. "Beijing's art scene has come a long way but there's still a way to go" says Wang, a public relations executive. "It's a lot cheaper to buy art here compared to Western countries and there's some money to be saved or made through this difference. Chinese people should, however, buy local art and not aspire to buying Western things as much. Chinese artists need the support and interest of local art buyers. Artists and buyers in Beijing can tend to get a little too Western-focused and not look to Chinese uniqueness. Artists, in turn, need more working and meeting spaces where originality can be encouraged. For that we need more public funding for the arts in China."

　　Apart from the obvious art spaces and traditions of Beijing and Shanghai, China's other cities are producing original modern work that often bears the identity of the particular city or province. Cities like Guangzhou, Xiamen and Chengdu also have germinating gallery scenes. Many provincial artists regularly move to Beijing to seek further recognition - according to several accounts in Asian and international art journals, Chinese provincial curators and artists often tend to be conservative, preferring to pass over societal themed works in favour of purely commercially viable ones. Cutting out the gallery middlemen meanwhile, many of Beijing's artists hold their own shows and display works in restaurants and bars around town.

　　Shanghai's municipal government, keen on challenging Beijing's pre-eminence as the cultural capital of China, has funded a new Shanghai Art Museum devoted to 20th century art. During the 1920s and 1930s Shanghai was China's cosmopolitan centre of the arts but today's excitement centres on glassy new galleries like ShanghART, Eastlink and BizArt, all largely funded by corporate cash. The Shanghai Art Museum is China's first institution promoting modern art on a public budget. Established large-scale events in China's financial capital include the annual Art Fair and Shanghai Biennale suggest Shanghai is regaining some of its allure as a haven of modern artistic sensibilities.

　　ShanghART, one of China's premier independent galleries for contemporary art, was established in 1996 by Swiss curator Lorenz Helbling. The gallery has since become a focal point for people interested in contemporary Chinese art and works with museums and institutions in China and around the world. More than thirty of China's most interesting and prominent artists are promoted and curated by ShanghART, where, encouragingly, the subject matter exhibited is as diverse as the range of media used.

　　Back in Beijing, artist and curator Lu Jie has been promoting the idea of communal art in China, taking art from city galleries into the countryside to spread its message and merits among the masses as Chairman Mao spread the ideas of communism and revolution. The Long March: A Walking Visual Display began in Ruijin on June 29, arriving at the Dadu River in Sichuan in early September. Along the way a group of wandering artists staged events for the benefit of townspeople. Sculptor Sui Jianguo's Mao-suited statue of Karl Marx was floated across a river in Yunnan. A train dining car dining was turned into an art gallery while a series of canvases were displayed at a Yunnan fish market. Shoppers at the market were asked for their opinions on the various pieces and later given the paintings to keep. Lu wanted to his viewers to "take the art into their homes and to discuss it, to evaluate it..." Art in China, Lu worries, "...risks becoming something understood and practised only by an elite."

　　International styles are converging here, but China's contemporary art is also a product of its environment. And Beijing's avant-garde, referencing the country's social evolution, hints at a bright future for the country's artists. Foreign buyers and collectors are fickle creatures, but for now the spotlight is turning - albeit slowly- onto works produced in China. More and better galleries and good promotion are however the elements of the success story most lacking. The quality of the work at Beijing's 798 space certainly isn't the problem. Space is. If dreams of turning the area into an artist zone are to be realised, more shuttered factories there will have to be converted to art space, quickly. If 798 is allowed to continue in its present location then Beijing really will be offering something unique to art-interested tourists who are frustratedly looking for meaningful galleries in the city.

　　With more attention and good intentions from government agencies and foreign art experts, China's modern artists should become a powerful force at international exhibitions and on the global art marketplace. Peddlers of substandard work will probably always pester tourists on Wangfujing but, hopefully, adequate government funding will soon mean exhibits must no longer linger in obscure spaces.