Exploring Modern Chinese Art with Dr. Katie Hill

Music. Welcome, everybody, to a new edition of the Art Business Podcast.

And my guest today is Dr. Katie Hill, who I know very well because she works at Sotheby's Institute of Art with me and has done for several years. So Katie is an expert on Chinese modern and contemporary art and is academic lead and senior lecturer at Sotheby's Institute of Art London. So, Katie, my first question for all my guests is, can you tell us about how you first got into art? Any childhood memories of realising there was this thing called art?

Yeah, I mean, we did have artworks on the walls in our house. And, you know, sort of the odd painting of a landscape, a sort of print of Thomas More, that kind of thing. You know, the odd sort of Cezanne kind of replica. So nothing, you know, a few original works, but I think I wasn't really aware of art, you know, sort of on my own terms in a way until I was a teenager. And I think one of the sort of formative moments was I went to Italy in my late teens.

I was probably about 17 and I went to Turin and I came across this amazing exhibition of pop art in a kind of industrial space. And it had things like giant toothbrushes in it, which I thought was amazing. So I was kind of wowed by it. And I had a very immediate response of just loving it. You know, so you sort of realize it's quite visceral. Yeah. So, you know, from that point of view, that's probably my first encounter with sort of contemporary art as something that could be very exciting.

And sort of alter your perception of things and what could be done. You know, I'd done quite a lot of pottery at school, by the way. So I did ceramics O-level and I actually spent a lot of time in the pottery studio at school. So it was a sort of, you know, sort of in a way a refuge, where me and a few friends just spent a huge amount of time producing pots and three-dimensional works, which I churned out and brought home. So I was obviously quite keen as well in the making of it.

When did you first get interested in China and Chinese art, which is now your main specialism? Yeah. So, I mean, I was quite a linguist. I think it led, it was really linguistic originally. So, I think that when I was doing languages at school, so I sort of did the classic, you know, 10 years of French, a lot of French, a lot of literature. We were lucky to have a very literary education in languages at that time.

So I did French and Italian A-level I did German O-level you know so I'd sort of very interested in languages and I liked languages a lot and I became interested in Chinese.

Again probably you know during sixth form I sort of came across bits and pieces with Chinese language and I sort of went to Chinatown you know and was fascinated by people writing Chinese and I had there was a chest in our house actually which did have bits and pieces because one of my ancestors lived in China at the end of the 19th century so there were sort of scrolls you know and also my grandfather actually was in Burma

from 1905 to 1925 working on the Burma road as an engineer so you know there had been this kind of Asia in the background you know sort of tail end of the colonial era. They were from Northern Ireland and he went to Burma and my other ancestor ended up in China and then became the treasurer of Korea at the turn of the century, which is quite amazing. So I think something fired my imagination there, probably very subconsciously.

And then I picked it up and I thought I was really interested in Chinese, particularly the script. I was really drawn to the aesthetics of the script. I sort of felt compelled to want to decode it. It was almost like a challenge. And so when I was applying to university, I just was very torn between doing Italian and Chinese. And I honestly just took the plunge. It was literally like a sort of plunge in the dark because I felt that you couldn't learn it yourself.

You could go to Italy, spend time there, and you'd pick up the language where you really couldn't do that with Chinese. You have to study it. So at that point, I just took the plunge and it was quite risky. I remember feeling very, you know, nervous about it, but actually it was fantastic. It was amazing. Edinburgh, I think, is very good for language. I remember when I was trying to work.

So I came from a Latin background and got into classical art via the language again, like you, this kind of language. But I remember when I was trying to work out where I wanted to go in the future with master's degrees. And I remember I went for various things, one of which was I got places offered in Celtic studies at Edinburgh University. But again, because I love the idea of actually studying these kind of ancient languages from the United Kingdom, you know, from Great Britain. Absolutely.

Actually, my Chinese professor in Edinburgh was also an expert on medieval Welsh. There you go. Which is extraordinary. Yeah. So, you know, there are the, if you're a linguist, you sort of want to go delving into these things. You just want to do every language. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. And so, no, that's very interesting. I never knew. It's interesting what you're saying about the subconscious and you're almost in your DNA from ancestors who've been in the regions and a box in your house and so on. So then you moved, having done your master's in Chinese at Adubri University, you moved on to do an MPhil at SOAS. School of Oriental and African Studies, a part of the University of London, in the history of art. And that was followed by a DPhil, I presume.

Yeah, I mean, really the MPhil, but yeah. So the MA, I mean, because in Edinburgh, it was Edinburgh, so you do a four-year degree and you end up with an MA on. So I sort of had, I conveniently came out with an MA, you know. So it wasn't as though I was doing a separate degree, but you sort of pass a certain point where you're into the honours. And that's because it's a Scottish system. So it means you do three years and one year in China.

And then the SOAS bit where I was registered for an MPhil was really the beginning of my PhD. But I transferred, I did probably one or two years at SOAS and I can't remember. I remember attending quite a range of lectures being sort of given, you know, trying to shape up the thesis. and I knew what I wanted to do roughly. But then I followed my supervisor to Sussex because he just started a career in academia from the V&A. Craig Junas, he's a very eminent scholar in the Ming.

And he was more open to sort of looking at critical theory. Whereas my supervisor at SOAS was more of a sort of Buddhist art specialist of the, you know, let's say, you know, the much earlier period. And so he didn't have such an open attitude towards contemporaneity. And that's really what I wanted to sort of delve into in more depth. So I followed Craig to Sussex and then ended up at Sussex. So I transferred really from SOAS to Sussex.

And then what became the subject of your PhD thesis?

Can you tell us about that. Yeah so it was called Relocating Contemporary Chinese Art and it was about the emergence of a field which had evolved really from it was pretty recent you know so I was really looking at it head sort of head-on really as a field that was still emergent it was very much at the fore you know the beginning and so it had sort of started in the 80s in China during the reform movement of Deng Xiaoping, you know, the opening up period.

And so there was a lot of very on the ground art movements, groups in China, very, very active. And so it was very much a grassroots movement that started contemporary art. And it gradually became incredibly productive, very experimental in the 80s. And then by the end of the 80s, when I graduated. Because of what was happening politically, so there was Tiananmen Square, June 1989, and then a lot of people around that time left China.

So there was a start to this global diaspora of Chinese artists, and some of them became very famous. So, for example, Xu Bing moved to New York, Gu Wanda, some famous names, Cai Guo Chang, the one who does the explosion events.

So you know some of the ones who went to America became really well known there was a whole group in Paris as well and those were the ones I was interested in and then other artists had come to the UK so actually what I was sort of realizing after my graduation and sort of traveling quite a lot that there were a lot of artists dotted around from China who've relatively recently left And I was very interested in the emergence of a new diaspora,

but also how that intersected with the international art world and what was going to happen to the representation of those kind of artists, you know, because it needed quite nuanced understanding, really, of their political and cultural backgrounds. Of course, if they're placed in an exhibition, there was a lot of misrepresentation going on or a lot of slightly reductive stereotyping.

What became my thesis was a very strong critique of that and also a critique of what I perceived as a very unmodernized field where it was all being rather romanticized, but actually the reality was much more complex.

For those artists yeah so that's what became my thesis yeah yeah and and when those artists in the diaspora after Tiananmen you know moved to places like New York are they are they do they get how do they make their money do they get the money teaching art in art or and or do they begin to realize there's a quite a market for their art and if there is an art market in places like New New York, and Europe for these artists, Chinese contemporary.

Is there kind of what has been argued about the surge in, say, African art recently, a Latin American, that it has exotic qualities? Is that part of it? And this is part of your understanding of stereotyping?

Definitely. Yeah, definitely. There was a lot of critical discourse about what was deemed exoticizing but also something like auto orientalizing it was called so it was sort of when artists themselves were sort of promoting themselves as you know Chinese artists heavily sort of pre you know strongly sort of over determining their identity but in a way that was, you know in a way it was sort of a necessity for them to remain visible and also to have a platform So you're right.

And so that push pull of sort of what they wanted to do and how they received was very much at the heart of my thesis. So yeah, but I think the market side is very interesting because I think a lot of them at the beginning didn't have any value. You know, it was a time when in the 80s, nobody had any money in China. It was a very, very low economy.

And so what you see in the 90s is when that big exhibition came over to be toured internationally, which was called China Avant Garde, New Art from China. It came to modern art Oxford, what was then called Museum Modern Art in Oxford, with David Elliott curating it. Yeah, so it was an important exhibition and that was 1993. So it suddenly appeared in the West for the first time and it was really exciting.

It was like, wow, this is new painting from China that nobody had seen, nobody knew what it was about, why are they doing this? Sort of figurative, slightly post-socialist, some of it was quite parodic. You know, Yemin Jun or sort of Fang Lijun, these grinning heads and sort of quite clear-cut imagery. But, you know, at the time, it sort of signaled a complete change in China. It was like, wow, if this is reflecting what's going on in China, this is really significant, which it was.

So I remember going to the Marlborough Gallery with my dad in 1993 to see one of these exhibitions. So they'd actually picked it up commercially. So your question's really interesting. And he was very sort of puzzled, you know, I've no idea what this means. But I was really at the very beginning of my research at that point. So I hadn't even started my PhD. So just it came around that time was a lot of excitement. It was very new.

And I think there'd also been Magician de la Terre in Paris, which was really significant. So, three artists from China had been selected and one of them, Huayong Ping, became strongly into my… I went to see him a lot, I interviewed him, I was trying to work out what he was trying to do, which was quite sort of complex.

And yeah and so he actually rose from you know let's say he arrived in Paris 89, and then it was Tiananmen so he never went back he just stayed and then by the end of the 90s 99 he was representing France in Venice I mean it's quite remarkable so the trajectory in the 90s was from unknown, you know, to that level of representation at the end of the 90s. So, globalization was very much happened sort of during the time I was doing my thesis and it was partly about that.

It was partly about transnationalism, you know, the sort of effect of globalization on something like contemporary Chinese art in that broader sort of field. Yeah, which was, of course, interesting and complex. And in Britain, it was very marginalised because of the more emphasis on sort of South Asia and also African Caribbean art in something like Iniva. You know, so these particular pockets of interest. And China was sort of on the edge of it.

Yeah, because I'm a classical archaeologist, art historian, so I only became aware of this really through, you know, taking over the direction of them, our business 2003 to 2004. And fairly within a couple of years, these big names of some of these artists you've been speaking about, we began to see them, you know, the economy, you'll remember, was doing well. The art market was blossoming everywhere.

The prices were just going up for every sector. and Chinese you know we're beginning to see more Chinese cultural tourists we're getting Chinese students maybe for the first time and this art looked very exciting to me this Chinese art at the time you know we're talking about 2004-5-6 and Sotheby's Christie's began to put it in their contemporary evening sales absolutely yeah absolutely and that's interesting because by that stage the market had evolved quite a lot but it had also been.

Continually going up from say the beginning of the market was really sort of 93 into the mid 90s that was the beginning of the art market for China and then by about 2000 I mean really it was a very very upward trend up to 2007 and you know then there was you know opening of kind of big new spaces in China so it was reflecting the kind of institutionalization of it but also So something like the Shanghai Biennale, which really became international in 2000.

So it does reflect exactly what you're saying. It became a much bigger thing and people would actually go especially to Shanghai to that biennale. And again, that was the first time I had a sort of international curating team, including Hohan Roo, who'd been in Paris.

So, you know, and he became a very prominent curator who really did a lot to sort of explore the most interesting side of it, really, and not, you know, again, do the opposite of stereotyping, but really sort of draw out some really interesting practices through his curatorial practice and writing.

While we're talking about the early millennium, Katie, you began to lecture, as I understand it, at SOAS. You began to actually give back some of the knowledge you've been creating, self-creating in your PhD and from your teachers and from interviews with artists, you began to lecture at SOAS in Chinese modern and contemporary art. And as I understand it, these years were also when you when your curating career began.

So maybe you could tell us about your first curatorial experience and how did that perhaps develop into more commissions to curate Chinese art exhibitions? Yeah, I mean, the first proper job in the academic. I mean, I was given teaching. In the late 90s, while I was doing my thesis. So I did my thesis at the time. I had three children while I was doing it.

Because that was meant that it was very protracted. Because I was sort of working all the way through, but I was also embroiled in tiny children. Am I right in saying your partner was Chinese? Yeah. So he's an artist from China. Yeah, yeah, totally. and we can get on to that because obviously he's really important also. Yes, absolutely.

But yeah, so in fact, what happened originally was I did a bit of teaching at SOAS, then I did a bit of teaching at Sussex while I was doing it, because under my supervisor who was at Sussex, and it was called Art and Society in Modern China or something.

And actually I did some work as a tutor on the the Christie's educate you know it was sort of a it was a sort of Asian art course with so us and Christie's there was sort of you know I became a tutor on those kind of Asian art courses and then in the in about and also I had worked in the National Art Library as a catalogue of Chinese art. Yeah, books. When I first graduated, and then I'd worked in an art dealers in Hong Kong, because I'd travelled a lot after I graduated.

So I lived in Hong Kong and sort of worked in art dealers doing cataloguing of objects for a sort of antique dealer of Chinese art. So when I came back, I ended up doing the thesis, and that took a long time. And then in about 2000, I got a job at Westminster University as a sort of research fellow in, and that was to be a curator for a collection in the university. Oh, right.

In fact, I was a sort of curator within an academic institution. Which was a, it's called the Chinese Poster Collection, and it's a post collection of about 800 to 900 posters from the more or less the Maui era from the 50s through to the 80s. That sounds amazing. It was really amazing. So I worked with somebody called Harriet Evans, who's a really impressive scholar of Chinese cultural studies, been really developing the field in her area.

And she was very interested in gender and things like that. And so she took me on as the curator of the collection. And then later that collection was sort of reduced into the archive. It didn't have its own sort of job to it. it was sort of put into the university art so it's not on display if anyone wanted to see it no but it is accessible by appointment and I did do quite a lot of work for its visibility by creating a website I mean I actually wrote a whole website for it in html way back.

So that was a sort of you know curator of a collection sort of job but So, you know, and then one project I did around that time was called The Political Body, and it was looking at the representation of the body in the posters via this revolutionary language, you know, visual language in these very graphic posters, very strident, and some of them were quite sort of violent.

So I was looking at the idea of the body as a sort of politicized representation of the body, and it was called the political body. So that was my first sort of funded exhibition, which was supported by the AHRC. It was at the Brunei Gallery. Brunei Gallery, which will come through in a moment because I haven't flagged yet to the listeners that you've got an amazing exhibition at the moment. And I've been to it twice, actually, and it finishes this weekend.

So we'll come back to that later because it's certainly something any listeners in London should catch if they haven't been already before it goes.

So we'll talk about that later. But you had some experience lecturing in China as well. You were invited to China to lecture. Not really i mean i've been back and forth to china a lot i have i haven't really taught in china i mean i i've i've done i've done exhibitions in china in british so late yeah we went to china and lived there for a year in the year leading up to the olympics and that led that led to one or two projects.

And one was quite an interesting one called English Lounge in a gallery called Tang Contemporary, which is now really quite a global gallery. And that was a sort of mix of British artists. So we had people like Martin Creed, we had Langlis and Bell, who did an on-site commission, which was amazing actually. And a few other sort of digital artists from the UK, but also Chinese and British Chinese artists.

So yeah that was quite a big project in 2009 so the first you know so my first sort of experience outside that more structured environment was when my husband's performance duo which is called mad for real jumped on tracy amin's bed at the turd prize in 1999 and i was i was there but we had our, son was one and a half. So, he was in a pushchair and I was kind of pushing him along.

And there were lots and lots of people because it had caused a lot of media because of Tracey Eamon's bed being so controversial. So, there'd been a huge amount of media already. Can this be art? This is outrageous. All of that. So, basically, I wrote the text. So I was already sort of, I suppose, really trying to kind of make that text available to what they were trying to do. And it was sort of a manifesto. So I handed out these bits of paper.

And, you know, it was an intervention, but the press really took it up. And so they were sort of put on, you know, thrust into the sort of limelight because that work, what was, you know, we would call a work, but the press was sort of outraged by it. They put it on every front page of every paper in the UK. It was quite outrageous, you know. It was in the tradition of the famous Carl Andre's pile of bricks. What a load of rubbish, I think, was the Daily Mail.

Well, one of the great headlines of that was, The Sun was fan hits sheet, which is fabulous. Anyway, we got a huge amount of mileage out of that. But that was a sort of, you know, I did start working with them on their work. So I was also, you know, they did the soy sauce ketchup fly. They, you know, they later produced a catalogue that I did most of the text for.

So I also wrote about their work, you know, and that became, that was sort of came, became part of my thesis as well about performance art and the, you know, the sort of. And identity discourse that surrounded that within both the UK and in kind of global terms. So, yeah, I'd sort of do both, if you like. Yeah. Now we've got you here, Katie. I thought that listeners like myself thinking, what was the kind of artistic purpose and strategy behind your husband jumping on the bed?

Could you tell us a little bit about that? well i mean it was a you know what it wasn't a protest work it wasn't we hate this work we've it was almost the opposite it was a kind of celebration oh in a way it was quite joyful but it was sort of engaging in it as a physical object that you that didn't jeopardize the artwork, It's already a mint. Exactly. It was an unmade mint. So the point, that was quite an interesting sort of way of approaching it because, of course.

You know, there's been issues around sort of vandalism and destroying artworks, but in fact, it was problematic for Tracey Amen and she was slightly sort of put out by the whole thing. And there was a fantastic article in The Independent where they did a map of all the objects that had been moved and how it was put back very carefully into the arrangement with a rather wonderful graphic. You know, the bottle of vodka, the condoms.

Everything in the position. I remember we drowned it for about an hour with my ML business students when we went to Liverpool, when we went to the Liverpool Biennale, and they moved it, they had it there, and we had some great seminars because a lot of us, I can't remember what year this was, but it was a lot later and you know the students hadn't seen they'd heard about it like the feminist art history lecturers loved it and you know they'd never seen it before so it was a really real locust to

discuss yeah absolutely it was quite a key moment actually because you know you could argue now she was promoting something very much at the heart of a kind of feminist practice that refused to play the game of sort of being a demure you know female artist And that's why she's become so important. You know, retrospectively, you can see how that trajectory took place. And yes, so that was quite interesting because it was two male artists.

You know, there's a gender discourse around it, but also two foreign artists. And they were misrepresented heavily. It was sort of two Japanese tourists. Oh, the stereotype. All sorts of things. But The Guardian, I mean, The Guardian took it up. There were quite a few also quite serious articles, so it gave rise this huge range of, opinion and discussion and they were actually ended up on things like have I got news for you.

And the end of year quiz so it became quite funny but but then they did a more you could argue a little bit more problematic work where they went into take modern when it opened and pissed on Duchamp's urinal of course again it was reversing the Duchampian kind of idea that this is you know you're converting an object into a conceptual work and they are sort of going back into what its original function of course there's been a whole debate about that as well that was

on the opening day was it it was a bit later it was a bit later but it had been and it was.

A new brand new gallery well i remember taking a whole building yeah exactly i remember taking then my styles in art student when i was on an art history survey in 2000 when it opened we went and and there was no one there when we walked in at 10 o'clock you know we were some of the first visitors public visitors and i remember being stunned by the louise bourgeois you remember the amazing sting is still spider with its eggs which was a fantastic feminist statement and also a statement

about site specificity of the spider in the in the disused warehouse yeah and i remember it have been amazing there was there was a hearse vitrine with seashells and i told the students story that now the tape was having to purchase it from hearse even though he'd offed it for free for many years all that stuff yeah yeah exactly when that opened i don't do agree katie that that tate modern i often say to my students this was part of the of the sudden Mm-hmm.

The Southern Exponential Movement in Love of Contemporary Art. Oh, completely. Absolutely. And I think, you know, that project of Tate Modern was an incredible achievement by Sirota. And, you know, he really did sort of represent that institute, you know, the building, the sort of commitment to achieving this idea of sort of we're going to go beyond British art into international art.

Of course, since then, I've been quite critical of its sort of engagement in certain areas yes and again you know you could argue it has ignored a whole community of Chinese artists who've lived here for many years and that to me is very problematic because you can easily invite somebody like Ai Weiwei a very famous big figure but you know this is London and you've got to acknowledge artists who are working here as well so I think there

are quite a lot of problems with Tate Modern and their collection it's very sort of eclectic and rather kind of odd in a way but I agree I mean you know it's an incredible achievement and also just seeing the number of people who go in and out of it you know it's a very open space yes it's created a lot of interaction I think yeah and a lot of school groups going in in a way they never used to go exactly and you know modern contemporary

art was a no-go place up till then I agree no it's been really successful yeah I know that the footfall they reckoned in six months is what they projected.

In a year they thought were going to come in within that figure already in 2000 so it was very much part of that ecosystem i was just going to ask when you when you became senior lecturer at southerby's institute of art and maybe you could tell us about the formation of the master's degree in modern and contemporary asian art that you were director and creator or maybe could say more about what went into that and and and some of them tell us about some of the anecdotes some of the trips to China

that you did with those students yeah I mean you know it was a great it was a great thing to be involved in because you know really the perception was that courses on East Asian art had become a little bit out of date and sort of you know erred on the classical side we're trying to modernize but that was the question you know should you still have a course a full-scale course on sort of Chinese art, you know, because it's a huge field to fit into.

But we could say that about any of the MAs into one year. And then, you know, I was invited to create a new course that sort of really answered to that question. So we sort of, you know, again, it was sort of the discussion was, should it be just China? Should it be Asia?

We opened it up to Asia and created something which allowed students to engage in a way in the history of modernism in Asia, which is really a very important area, which is still fairly under research, you know, and then give the contemporary side. So through that course, it was a really nice way of bringing in expertise on other areas of Asia.

So India, you know, Southeast Asia, Korea and Japan, because obviously even East Asia is fairly complex with these different, you know, different art cultures within each of those countries. And if you're if you work on China, you tend not to work on Japan. I mean, you know, they're very separate, which is a bit strange, but it's true.

They are you know they've evolved quite separately so yeah we we did go on amazing trips I mean we had great visits you know we would meet really quite well-known artists on site either in their studios and you know there was a really wonderful visit to a well-known ink painter who's actually in the exhibition in Soas called Wang Dongling who did this huge calligraphy in that show and there's another one of his works upstairs we visited him in Hangzhou with his studio full of his

ink paintings and calligraphy which was fabulous you know because he's a bit of an older generation artist who's become pretty well known globally within that field as a sort of pioneer of ink and he was born in the 40s so he's been attached to you know and linked to that Academy, the China Academy, which is really the leading academy in China for many years. So it's really interesting sort of being with students with.

People like him you know artists like him who've had this you know experience of Chinese history really going into the 21st century and weren't really part of the diaspora but they're kind of authentic Chinese no I mean but there's no such thing as authentic I mean you know that's the other question he has lived abroad no he has a lot of them have had time abroad I'm not saying everybody but quite a lot of them spent some time in the u.s or abroad you know in one way or another.

But so that's quite common to go and study i you know let's say germany the u.s canada australia but quite a lot of them came back or went back to china yes so i suppose in a way that sort of marks them out from the ones who stay yeah i mean but this is true of a lot of artists i'm thinking I school Patrick Heron who if you look you know he spent a lot of time in like South America and other places you know they people do artists do travel exactly and

they I remember I remember meeting a lot of artists some of whom now well known when I they were scholars at the British School at Rome and they the Italian light made them paint a completely different palette and they bring it back to London and wonder why it doesn't sell you know it's it's very interesting in the way these these things work on art absolutely absolutely and quite a lot of artists from china studied in germany and they're heavily you know

interested in people like kiefer for example so yeah it's very much those things of course there is that sort of resonance with the history of germany the east german side of germany you know that so there's quite interesting sort of points of contact often with these experiences You mean the parallel histories Cold War onwards you know, East and West and China. And I mean, in China, there's been a very long relationship with France for a hundred years.

Obviously, also the reference to the French Revolution, which is evident in visual culture in China right through the 20th century. But they had a very specific movement of artists coming over to Paris in the 20s.

So there are these kind of very interesting histories about China's relationship with the world through these kind of cultural connections, which are very those artists were visiting paris in between the wars not just like most like british artists like hetworth and co who who are there to kind of be where it's at with picasso and brack etc but they were there they were there also because of the revolution yes that that's a bit later the ones who were there in the 20s went to try to engage in

modernism and obviously it was the center of modernism so you know that was the way of sort of experiencing european culture and looking at really painting which was quite new oil painting in china was new in the 20s so it was considered really avant-garde to be an oil painter and then things like self-portraits were new you know the idea of standing and sort of painting yourself in oil was actually a huge moment of change in china a sort of in a way a kind

of epiphany of this is a new subjectivity this is kind of who we are we want to be modern those kind of and then later you're right so later people like zhao ji who you'll know the big abstract painter on you know he reached amazing.

Prices on the market until he you know even well after he died but he he lived to be a hundred about one maybe and he went to china in the late 40s so you're right he went to get out really and stayed and you know became this incredible abstract painter but you couldn't have done abstraction of that type at all if you'd stayed in China there's no absolutely no way you'd have been allowed to so you know it's very very interesting those sort of you know it there are definite splits where you

know if you're there you're going to do this sort of work but if you're in China there's no way you can have to do socialist realist figurative yeah and the Similar things were going on in the Eastern Bloc and Russia, obviously, and the Stalin. Tell us about your foundation of OCA, the Office for Chinese Contemporary Art. Maybe you could tell us about its mission and some of the highlights over the years.

Being in control of that or sorry being part of that yeah no absolutely I mean we set it up when we really around the time that we went to China with the kids you know we went to live there because Sai my husband's Taiyuan he went to have a studio there he wanted to produce work in China and he needed to have a studio there so I went and we sort of went as a family and lived very near the art district 798 which is the sort of you know the best

known art district and the first art district in China where you know Beijing is a very very prolific art scene and at that time it was incredibly active so we around that time really was when we started to found Oka because when we came back we we realized lots of galleries were there there were lots of artists doing lots of thing you know it's very huge numbers of studios it's an amazing sort of productive cultural site and so we felt there'd be.

Really a lot of scope for engagement across you know what's happening here and in China and that's how it came about really and obviously because my husband's in those circles of artists you know we knew a lot of artists and it meant there was a good sort of starting point for making those connections and and maybe consolidating it.

And sort of producing projects doing you know yeah developing exhibitions and developing enabling artists to come over to the UK and vice versa sort of us doing projects there yeah so that was you know that was what gave rise to it and we sort of gave it rather a sort of it sounds like a rather bureaucratic name but you know the intention wasn't really to become a gallery we did actually have a gallery for it for a short time later on so it was really about activating that community

and producing projects collaboratively and we've really done that all along of course in covid it all went very quiet we've sort of been on the back burner because i was so busy academically you know and that took up a lot of energy especially with the MA but yeah we have continually sort of produced projects so yeah I mean you know bits bits and pieces really so some projects funded by public funding like the Arts Council some

invited projects by artists in China where there'll be a gallery involved who will you know foot the bill as it were or kind of cover that project for instance I did one in Hong Kong a few years ago with an well-known. He's a museum director in China and he is also an ink painter. So, you know, we did this quite big project with him in Hong Kong at the Hong Kong arts center with a gallery called 3812. And,

That was great. I mean, it was an interesting time to be in Hong Kong because it was going through a lot of turbulence at the time with protests and, you know, I arrived and the airport was kind of bombarded with all these absolutely huge crowds and you couldn't actually get out of the airport.

But, you know, within that project, it was a way of sort of working with an artist who's based in southern China with the gallery and a really sort of established space in Hong Kong, which was quite a well-known venue so that's the kind of ideal combination where it also comes together through the different elements you know to bring it together uh yeah and then bits and pieces with you know I've done a lot of writing for artists in catalogs

and you know it varies from a single sort of project which might be a piece of writing or a curatorial text to a full scale exhibition and how does it work as a business is it a registered charity and not-for-profit no it's at the moment it's a what do you call it a single.

It's just a one person you know band at the moment the question is whether to, move it towards more of an institutional yes i see well yeah so your question is quite person because we've been trying to grapple with how to develop it on you know from now on it sort of feels like it needs you know we're really planning to sort of relaunch it and sort of shift its its focus really but with the basic mission is the same you know it's effectively it's about enhancing the

community enabling projects to happen and to sort of give maybe a more critically nuanced sort of interpretation of artist practice from you know that linguistic sort of background says what we'd call the sinophone sphere now because of course china becomes if you say chinese it's got all these connotations and there are you know chinese communities are very varied and broad globally you know you've got china hong kong singapore Malaysia.

You've got a huge global diaspora and lots of language groups. So you kind of need to really be able to convey those nuances and differences. But yeah, there is a lot of scope because there's such a little engagement here really, you know, and there's really the center in Manchester, Isaiah is, you know, and it used to be the Chinese art center in Manchester. And that's been there for years, so decades.

And so actually there's very little apart from in the commercial sector where galleries, you know, have lists of Chinese artists like Pace has a strong engagement with China.

There's tabula rasa in east london you know certain galleries where they are they have that connection but not huge numbers and as you say the issue is how it's a bit like africa and latin america these are places with many nations and there's some similarities but there's an awful lot of differences and we're still kind of working out i'm still trying to work out you know i think it's absolutely to work out what is the difference about the different and you know,

Do you remember in the Biennale, I went around some of those pavilions and it was quite different stories that people were telling, you know. And I was going to ask you, actually, before we come on to your, finally, to your current exhibition, you came out with the Art Business Group this year, which is fantastic because we have increasing numbers. You have a lot of Chinese students and Southeast Asian students, South Asian students, which I think they really appreciated that.

Can you tell us about we have to just for the the listeners we have to develop these mini tours. Which are based on our interests or you know i did some african pavilions outside of the mage canali i also did more about my expertise on like a a looted art walk a classical ancient greek art that when they conquered constantinople can you tell us what you did because i did involve i think some major exhibitions of chinese art.

In or one of them was yes yes i mean on the on the previous trip we went on you know earlier in the year we went earlier we did it twice yeah we did go to the big exhibition of sung fan joe who's a very sort of prominent name you know very successful painter in this very amazing space and next to that was the the misericordia sorry the church the misericordia yes and that's the Yuhong show that we went back to again so that was really nice because we

had a very it's a very beautiful presentation within an old church a disused church and so it's actually very beautifully curated by Alexander Munro from the Guggenheim in New York and in fact the the first time we went we met the artist there which was an amazing sort of random coincidence and a great you know it was really fortuitous so the students were able to kind of ask her questions about her work and then the second time we went slightly unbelievably the curator

suddenly appeared at the end she had come back to see it because it was the last week that it was on but yeah no it was a really great visit because you.

Know it's that having that engagement in fact she's had a show at Lyssen Gallery during this autumn so there was a good connection with London as well and we'd be you know I'd been to the opening quite a few I think of our students have been at the opening because of their interest in as an artist so that was great yeah and so it's always and then we went to the Singapore Pavilion which was fun as well it's.

An artist called Robert Jaorun Hui, who's actually an artist we have taken students to his studio in Singapore, you know, a while back. And, you know, I remember his studio was very chaotic and filled with sort of random things and sort of a weird bull with fish in it because he's very into nature and sort of animals and things. So it was quite interesting that, you You know, having gone to that visit a long time ago with students and then you see his, you know, his representation

at the Venice Biennale, the pavilion. It's really fabulous, actually. It's really nice. Yeah, because we were there in the last week and we were just serendipity. I went down to look at another African gallery. We're in the wrong place in the in the salt, you know, the Renaissance salt stores down by the Dugana. And we went in the we went we went in the Armenian gallery. and the curator had just come back for the last week just to oversee.

And he told us these amazing stories about the show there. And, you know, we all know what problems Armenia has had and it's still having, of course, politically. So you recently created this exhibition of modern Chinese inkworks on paper at the Brunei Gallery in Soares, which is running to the end of this week. So anyone listening to this, I'll try and get this out tomorrow morning. And you know hopefully you get to this point and you will go and visit it it's well worth visiting.

So Katie can you tell us how that came about and speak about your choice of artists and, their and their work and maybe how does that exhibition in your mind compare to anything you've done before is it the culmination of anything or is it just a different take I mean it's not really the culmination, but it does link to quite a lot of work I've been doing on ink for the last few years.

And I think that really reflects the fact that that field of ink has really, really exploded in the last sort of 10 years. You know, it's become huge and very diverse and globalized. And because I think because of the sort of renewal of classical culture in China, the renewal of interest in things like Chinese philosophies, Chinese religions. And the engagement with that classical heritage, but also the literary heritage.

It's really interesting because, you know, when we were studying, it was very much... You know, we did classical Chinese and classical texts, but China itself was very much experienced the sort of, you know, the tail end and aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. So it's completely very, very political and very Maoist. Even when we were studying, we were using quite political language even to talk to each other. I mean, people were using the word comrade on a daily basis to give you a sense

of the change. So it's massively changed. And the 21st century, I think I'll be talking to your students, to our students about this this week. You know, it's just a very different world. It's very much more developed. It's very diverse. It's still an incredibly productive and prolific cultural space. I'd say the most active and largest art sphere in the world really because in China, numbers matter. I mean, it's a huge country with a huge population. So you literally have thousands of artists.

And of course, if you think of the academies churning out new graduates every year, it gives you a sense of those numbers. So I think to your question, I mean, this exhibition, which is called Strange Wonders was trying to look at the idea of Taoism and really the idea of this engagement with the Tao Te Ching, the classic of the Tao. And of course, everybody sort of knows Taoism, but actually that text in Chinese is pretty.

It's very rich, it's very profound, and it's quite difficult linguistically. So, you know, once you're going into those concepts of the Tao and the, you know, ideas that we all know about, about sort of balance and nature and the cosmos and, you know, letting the world flow around you while you keep your back straight, which are those kinds of ideas that are built into the Tao Te Ching. And really what I was trying to explore was the way that artists are, in a way.

Going right back into these classical texts and drawing on them, partly for their sort of cultural engagement of that culture, the richness and the sort of endurance of that culture. But also I'm sort of arguing in a way as a strategy for survival because it's quite a harsh, you know, reality. You are in this big, huge, quite powerful authoritarian state. You know, there's a lot of control. There's a lot of facial recognition,

you know, fingerprint. You know, there's a lot of that kind of control on the individual, really. I was thinking about the famous Bloodline series that was with big hits in the early millennium. Exactly. So, in a way, the idea of sort of reverting or kind of turning back towards these very deep philosophies that have endured for centuries, if not millennia.

So you've got the I Ching, the Book of Changes, is one of the works that one of those calligraphies, the one from Hong Kong Wuxi Swam, is showing in that work and so on. You know, it requires a huge amount of sort of intellectual work in a way, but it also gives a lot. It's hugely enriching. It's a bit like, you know, us going back to our classical text. I mean, it's always going to be enriching. You know, it's incredibly sustaining, you know, literature.

It's a return to folk roots. It happened with nationalism in places like Finland and all those countries that were in the early 20th century. And, you know, it's interesting that you talk about the I Ching. I mean, it's interesting that the classic translation version has an introduction by Carl Jung. I mean, that's how culturally important this has been considered for a long time. It's hugely important, absolutely.

And you know, one of the arguments that can be made about these things is that.

Eastern philosophies, and particularly something like Taoism, Buddhism, not so much, particularly Taoism and Buddhism have really very strongly informed the development of modernism in the West in the global sphere no question at all you know but yeah no the the other so one of the components I'll show you the catalogue here is this one which is the catalogue I worked on called Amid the Mountain Street well I sort of named it that but it's a collection of work which are you know ink works which

are shown many of which are shown on the ground floor beautiful honestly yeah that's why i don't often go back to the show but i went yeah and actually that was one that was quite popular the yao rejong who's a taiwanese artist so there are two very quite well-known taiwanese artists and you know it's a it's got him in a tiny pavilion with his cat in the middle of this landscape but so people love that because it's quite

fun it's very um it's quite decorative as well so yeah so that component was really because I'd worked on this catalogue really for most of this year with this collector from belgium a belgium, who had acquired many of the works from a gallerist called Michael Goodhouse. He's always at TAFAF. But he's had some quite serious health issues, he's getting a bit older, and he wanted to pass that to me.

So putting together that catalogue of her works, which is ink paintings and bronzes, so I can show you the bronze section. This is a bronze from the Warring States period, which is rather amazing. So they have a collection of bronzes with the ink paintings. Yeah, so these kind of range from very early works right the way through to the Ming and then the ink paintings.

And then the basement is, as you know, an artist called Jidze, whose son is really a friend from the Central Academy who's been very central in bringing a lot of British art to China. He's translated a lot of texts about contemporary art and art theory into Chinese, and he's been running the museum. He's the director of the museum, the curator of the museum at the Central Academy in Beijing. So he's also been very active as a writer, as an academic, and also as a curator.

And it's his father's work, Jitsa. So he was very keen. He was the one who really initiated the project. He wanted to bring his father's work over. His father died in 2015, and he has been very keen to try to disseminate it globally.

And so that project was, postponed for three years because of covid you know he wasn't able to get out of china and eventually we managed to get it over and i added the other collection on the ground floor so it sort of made in a way that was curatorially very challenging so that's kind of multi-layered i didn't realize that is there two different sets yeah they work very nicely together yeah i think they're quite complementary you know one's much more

sort of in a way jesus work his incredible sort of output in his later life and he was self-taught he had a very tough life his family had got caught up in a you know they were on the wrong side of the communist party pre-revolution and that had a huge ongoing effect on on his life with very difficult circumstances so ultimately he sort of produced that giant scroll that you see in the basement of the 40 meter scroll.

And it's i mean i just immediately thought immersive which is the trendy work now and it was immersive in a kind of traditional heritage manner you know incredible the way well i think that was the curating i don't know whether it was it meant thank you david yeah no we did we did try to you know we felt it needed to be the central focus and that that space in the middle really worked very well i mean we couldn't show the full 40 meters because it's way too big so it's like

22 meters of it and then rolled up you know and actually the technicians did an amazing job of hanging it so yeah we did it is quite carefully curated i mean the other paintings all around as you saw they're quite intense and a lot of them are sort of quite cosmic and some of them are quite planetary some of them are landscaping with sort of clouds and mountains and very big scale I mean he produced these works in one room with a table you know you know even

that giant but it is continuous it is continuous like landscape.

Yeah yeah and he did each section you know on a table and how long is what's the complete length when if it was all 40 meters i just thinking about the parthenon freeze which is oh yeah how that compares i can't remember now how long that is but it's another kind of continuous you know yeah but but yeah and katie any kind of present future plans in the new year, I mean not specifically I mean I would love to get back to China so that's one

of the sort of ideas within hopefully within the next year because it's been very difficult.

You know losing that connection is really difficult and I think a lot of you know that that is also true of our student body you know there was a very difficult period for, at least three years where it was very difficult to you know physically go back yeah we sort of the connection so really the you know i'd love to reconnect with artists in china and and my husband's family are in china we we can go back to hopefully to nanjing and you know it may be initiate some

projects there yeah and really i'm also you know i i will be continuing to write and, I'm developing a paper for the AAH on activism in the Chinese contemporary art field, you know, about how that's changed from a more kind of confrontational activism in art practice to something a lot more fluid and sort of multiple. So it's this idea of this kind of politics changing, you know, everything's changed, the discourse is changing quite rapidly.

And then just really trying to grapple with how we're developing OKA and really to push it more towards. More institutional framework to do more partnerships and think about it as having a much stronger function within the kind of British landscape, you know, working with perhaps museums and institutions. To activate projects. So that seems to be more of a slightly longer-term goal and of course, as you know, there's always things that we're just so busy, you know, you know, David.

I mean, we'd love to work with more younger artists and reconnect with the older generation who still need a lot more support and visibility, so it's a bit of a mix.

But yeah, to expand that sort of activity really and yeah and and continue what we're doing at the moment which is the same but it's sort of a field that has you know sort of huge potential still and I agree I think we're just scratching this we're just scratching the surface at the moment and there's so much work to be done but I think on behalf of the listeners thank you for sharing that with us dr katie hill and you know i i just like to i thank you

for your contribution to this i think there's an awful lot of people out there but that that would also want to thank you for your contribution to our understanding really of chinese modern contemporary art i think it's been wonderful um thank you katie thanks david it's been a real honor to be invited to your podcast and i've really enjoyed the chat it's great and um yeah well hopefully we'll have more in a year's time we can see how things are going. Music.