Saatchi Gallery

I went to the new Saatchi Gallery in the Kings Road..a very impressive space with twelve great galleries within. Julian Schnabel was on the top floor and by the time I got to his room I'd seen over sixty works by twenty four contemporary Chinese artists. The Chinese work was good though pretty much like you'd expect from any Western artist (The Chapman Brothers and Ron Mueck spring to mind among others) – except for the jokes about Mao. But nothing really to inform my current work, and the Schnabel paintings were at least interesting in that respect...They are massive however, as one would expect from this bombastic American giant and I doubt I'll ever get to make work this big...(Apart from stations, theatres, concert halls, galleries and museums and the studio I used to have at APT, I've hardly spent any time in a room with a ceiling height above 12ft)...

All the paintings are worked over a stretched polyester print of a Chinese painting of a woman that he took from some old mirror in his collection, so they all have the same ethereal figure in the background. Polyester? Yes, polyester. It's a bit shiny...
The only image reference I can find is this auction website:
http://www.artnet.com/artwork/425875010/424237643/julian-schnabel-untitled-chinese-painting.html

I'd recommend the Chinese show The Revolution Continues: New Art From China and a visit to this really great new venue (although there's no cafe yet and nowhere to sit, and the compulsory cloakroom is understaffed especially if it's raining). I wouldn't recommend going to the Saatchi website which is a horrible and frightful mess but there is a lot of information about the artists there (http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/). You can also see a small selection of the work on show at this Grauniad link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2008/oct/06/saatchi.gallery.art.china?picture=338325619
And you can read a review by Laura Cumming here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/oct/12/art-saatchigallery
She reckons the Schnabels are "trashy"...
And Adrian Searle doesn't like any of it, including the building...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/oct/07/saatchi.gallery.searle

Oh well...

I told my artist friend Deepa about the show and commented on how the Chinese artists (both young and old) seem to be living very comfortable middle class lives in Beijing. She responded with her take on the successful Indian artists living very well in Mumbai, and how Saatchi is creating the market for artists from China, India and the Middle East. Big money is changing hands and the new rich in these places are investing in art, even as we hear reports that the Western art market is in a credit crunch slump. One of the most successful Indian artists, she says, lives in Mayfair. It's a different world, she sighed.

I found a report, again in The Grauniad, that discusses the effects of this new market. Jonathan Watts meets the Chinese artists "in the grip of a goldrush":
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/mar/13/art.chinaarts2008

On a final note: in The Guardian, Jonathan Jones quotes Damien Hirst from 2004:
" ... Art is about life and the art world is about money although the buyers and sellers, the movers and shakers, the money men will tell you anything to not have you realise their real motive is cash, because if you realise - that they would sell your granny to Nigerian sex slave traders for 50 pence (10 bob) and a packet of woodbines - then you're not going to believe the other shit coming out of their mouths that's trying to get you to buy the garish shit they've got hanging on the wall in their posh shops ... Most of the time they are all selling shit to fools, and it's getting worse."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2008/oct/28/damien-hirst

Ho,ho,ho...