Conquering space in foreign lands
SHAILAJA TRIPATHI
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Indian contemporary art seems to have found many takers in China.
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Indian art is doing well abroad, and this has people in Shanghai intrigued.
Overview “Last Supper Gaza” by Vivek Vilasini (left) and “False Friends” by Mithu Sen.
Indian art is gradually making inroads into the Chinese art market. Testifying this is “India Xianzai” — art exhibition showcasing the works by 22 senior Indian artists at Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Shanghai from July 15 t
o August 30, 2009. According to Aparajita Jain, owner of the Seven Arts Gallery Limited which is taking the artists there, “This is the first time Indian art is being showcased in a museum space, as earlier Indian art was only showcased at art fairs, etc.”
In Shanghai’s first private and non-profit contemporary art museum, Chinese art lovers will get to sample canvases, sculptures, multi-media installations of artists like Mithu Sen, Jagannath Panda, Thukral and Tagra, Atul Dodiya, Fariba Alam, Hema Upadhyay, Justin Ponmany, Subodh Gupta and others. “With the proliferation of “Indian” and “Chinese” contemporary art, it becomes increasingly crucial to discuss whether the classification of art according to nationality is still a valid one, and if so, what is the distinctive paradigm that describes Indian contemporary art? With such questions in mind we approach India Xianzai as a survey exhibition, or a first step towards introducing the current milieu of Indian contemporary culture to China,” Diana Freundl, one of the three curators of the show, quotes from her catalogue essay in an e-mail interview.
Mithu Sen voices the gender and racial identity, kitsch, and physicality or mortality in “False Friends” and “Half Full” — culled out from the series of her two solo shows in New York and Delhi in 2007. In “False Friends”, a grid of photo-montages of self-portraits taken by acquaintances or strangers during her travels around the world and an animation video film, Mithu responds to their reactions to her foreign looks. “Since the show is in a foreign land, I chose the works which are talking about identity and its crisis with all of its incompleteness/half full identities,” elaborates Mithu.
Perhaps such ideas and the language in which are they are being expressed have got an approval from the viewers and art connoisseurs at the Shanghai Art Fair, Art Beijing and auctions at Hong Kong. The Chinese fairs and auctions are slowly gaining repute in the international art circuit and Indian art has frequently been showcased at these platforms. “It is more of the Taiwanese who are buying Indian art. Indian art’s success in Shanghai can be attributed to a great extent to their showing at fairs/exhibitions there, but is also largely because Indian art is doing extremely well abroad, and this has people in Shanghai intrigued and therefore they want to know more about it,” confirms Jain.
Freundl agrees that commonalities between the contemporary art of the two Asian countries also has a role to play in here. Jitish Kallat, in fact, is working on an essay that examines the ancient links between India and China for MOCA. “I personally feel there are several similarities in terms of style and concept. Of course we can find similarities in the history and in the development of both economies, etc. Also, we see a large amount of attention being placed on contemporary art from both countries and the effect this has can have on the artists, though not always for the better,” she says.
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