STEPHAN ZHOU

GUY ULLENS: A WINDOW INTO THE INTRICACIES OF THE CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART MARKET

In the early 2000s, Guy Ullens, a prominent collector and supporter of contemporary Chinese art, suffered a severe loss of reputation after gainfully selling a large portion of his art collection. The Chinese public interpreted the sale not only as the ultimate betrayal of Ullens’ early efforts to promote contemporary Chinese artists, but also as a form of Western cultural imperialism in China. Meanwhile, the media used this public resentment and portrayed Ullens as one of the root problems of the contemporary Chinese art world and art market. In this paper, I explore this commonly oversimplified and controversial issue as a window into the intricacies of the Chinese art market. I argue that Ullens’ controversy should be understood as a convergence of the problems of the Chinese art market, not as its cause.

China’s first auction house was established in 1993. Within almost three decades of existence, the Chinese art market became the second largest in the world. Despite its soaring growth and the great national pride invested in its development, numerous foundational problems marred its success, including the dominance of the secondary art market (auction houses) over the primary art market (galleries, museums, art critiques), and its unsustainable nature due to the massive amount of price bubbles that it has accumulated. Following an overview of the current state of the contemporary Chinese art market, I first turn to Ullens’ contribution to it through the Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) that he established in the 798 Art District in Beijing -- a district that struggles to balance cultural promotion and inevitable commercialization. Then, I focus Ullens’ approach to art collecting, which entails incentivizing the artists, generating artworks, speculative collection, and profit-making, and trace how this approach is viewed in the Chinese context. Finally, I examine how Ullens’ collection and actions have played a part in rekindling historical tensions tied to European cultural imperialism towards China, revealing how the ever-increasing flow of Chinese artworks in the international art market incessantly poke the Chinese public’s nerves.