The Chinese journalist and lecturer Kejia Wu displays her deep knowledge of the Chinese art market in this new book. It offers a thorough, English-language analysis of the market, its origins, its extraordinary growth over the past 30 years and its uneasy relationship with official government policy. As a columnist for the Financial Times China and author of Tefaf’s China Art Market report in 2019, Wu is ideally placed to tell this story, and she does so in fascinating detail.
The book is divided into three sections. The first part traces how the art market rose, like a phoenix, from the devastation of the Cultural Revolution. As Wu remarks, even today this remains a sensitive, even taboo subject: “Most people do not want to mention what happened, let alone relive this period in great detail. This lack of information has resulted in the media and art critics enthusiastically writing about the miraculous rise of the Chinese art market, without closely examining how such a ‘fairytale’ could have happened in the first place.”
She digs deep into this “fairytale”, outlining the problems posed by the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the restitution of cultural objects that had been ransacked by the Red Guards and detailing some of the lawsuits brought by dispossessed collectors. She then explains how the two leading auction houses, Poly and China Guardian, came into being in the mid-1990s. Initially traditional art dominated, such as scrolls, ceramics and bronzes.
Fast forward to the early 2000s, when contemporary art really entered the scene. Galleries were set up in the 798 district in Beijing, Sotheby’s Hong Kong created a new stand-alone category for Chinese contemporary art, Western galleries started opening on the mainland and private museums were established. And then Art Basel powered into Hong Kong, buying up the initial Art HK fair in 2011 and transforming the territory as the Asian destination for contemporary art. Wu rounds off her analysis of the market with a section boldly predicting the future—from the buying behaviour of wealthy young Asians to the likelihood of private museums being able to sustain their ambitions.
What is particularly interesting in this section is the number of interviewees, which range from established dealers such as Lorenz Helbling to collectors including Jenny Wang of Fosun, artists such as Zhang Xiaogang and Liu Xiaodong and auction house specialist Evelyn Lin.
The second section, entitled “The Paradox of Two Parallel Art Systems”, examines the complicated relationship between China wanting its culture to be used as “soft power” and its desire to control every aspect of people’s lives. “China is the only major art market in the world where an immense state-endorsed-and-censored art system and a significant market-oriented art system co-exist in parallel,” writes Wu. She explains how difficult it is for curators, art fair organisers and galleries to negotiate the censorship criteria, since these are “often more a concept than a strict set of written rules”. And she quotes the Chinese president Xi Jinping: “We must tell the world positive Chinese stories.” This of course may clash with what contemporary artists are trying to say in their art.
Finally, Wu tells the stories of five artists—Xu Bing, Li Songsong, Qiu Anxiong, Lu Yang and Zheng Bo—from three different generations, including those who lived through the traumas of the Cultural Revolution, showing how they have shaped their practices as a function of their environment. The story of Zheng Bo pulls together the different threads of the overall story including the influence of Western culture on Chinese creators as well as Zheng’s concerns with Taoism, of the ecology and the situation of migrant workers in Hong Kong, where he now resides. He was the only artist from China to be identified as one of the biggest biennial stars by Artnews at the Venice Biennial in 2022.
• Kejia Wu, A Modern History of China’s Art Market, Routledge, 280pp, 15 colour & b/w illustrations, £120/£34.99 (hb/pb), published 8 May
• Georgina Adam is art market editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper and a contributor to the Financial Times
A 54-year-old artist from Washington state has been sentenced to 24 months of probation and 200 hours of community service for presenting himself as a Native American artist, despite his lack of tribal enrollment or Native heritage.
Lewis Anthony Rath, of Maple Falls, Washington, pleaded guilty in March 2023 to violating the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, which forbids the misrepresentation of artists as tribal members for monetary purposes. US district judge Tana Lin read a letter submitted by Terry Rambler, chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, in open court, detailing the harm Rath’s scheme had caused his community.
The investigation into Rath began in July of 2018, when the Indian Arts and Crafts Board received the first complaints related to Rath. For over a year, he had been selling fake Native American wooden totem poles, transformation masks and pendants in various stores around Seattle. When agents executed a search warrant at Rath’s residence, they also recovered feathers from birds protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
“Rath’s victims are real: they are Indian artists, many who struggle to make a living, who lost out on sales to those who seek authentic Indian artwork; and they are also consumers who were defrauded into purchasing fake Indian art,” Tate London, an assistant US attorney, said in a statement.
Meridith Stanton, the director of the board of the US Department of the Interior’s Indian Arts and Crafts Board, concurred. “Counterfeit Indian art, like Lewis Anthony Rath’s carvings and jewelry that he misrepresented and sold as San Carlos Apache-made, tears at the very fabric of Indian culture, livelihoods and communities,” Stanton said in a statement. “Rath’s actions demean and rob authentic Indian artists who rely on the creation and sale of their artwork to put food on the table, make ends meet and pass along these important cultural traditions and skills from one generation to the next.”
A variety of other high-profile breaches of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act have come to legal fruition over the past year. Earlier this month, Cristobal “Cris” Magno Rodrigo was sentenced for operating a forgery ring of Alaska Native objects. And in May, Jerry Chris Van Dyke, a Seattle-based artist, was sentenced to federal prison for his fake Indigenous carvings.
It’s the time for many of us to see and photograph the auroras. Sadly, thatt generates a lot of invalid arguments about how the images should or should not look. But here’s how you can capture them in all their glory.
An interesting discussion developed in the comments section of a previous article I wrote. I was about whether my use of in-camera and post-production digital effects could still be called photography. It’s an old argument, but it got me wondering where we draw the line, especially when photographing the aurora.
I’ve spoken before about the rift that lies between reality and a photograph; our eyes only pick up a fraction of all the information that makes up reality. Some physicists are struggling with the nature of reality and claim that our universe is just a “product of quantum machinations in a lower dimensional setting.” In plain English, they are theorizing that reality is an illusion.
However, if, as The Beatles’ song Strawberry Fields Forever suggests, nothing is real, and the world around us is an illusion, does anything matter? That idea doesn’t help us in our day-to-day lives. We must rely on naïve realism and believe that the world we see around us is real and as it is, otherwise we can neither function in our daily lives nor in society.
Nevertheless, a photograph is one more step away from actuality. So, although we adopt a naïve realistic approach to what we see about us, with photos it still isn’t as simple as some would have you believe. This is illustrated best when we come to photographing the aurora. Why? Because our cameras reveal what our eyes cannot see.
We are fast approaching Solar Maximum. It’s the time when the 11-year cycle of the sun’s magnetic poles’ flipping occurs. Large numbers of sunspots appear, and the sun’s irradiance increases by 0.07%. There are solar storms with Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) spewing enormous amounts of plasma and extending magnetic fields far into space, including at the Earth.
CMEs take 15-18 hours to reach us. They vary in speed from 250 kilometers per second (km/s) to nearly 3,000 km/s. In comparison, the fastest manmade object was the Parker Solar Probe, which reached speeds of a sluggish 147.5 km/s. Putting that into context, the maximum speed limit on an Interstate Highway in the USA is 0.033 km/s.
When these high-speed energized particles slam into our planet’s upper atmosphere, they are deflected by our magnetic poles. They then interact with the molecules of mainly oxygen in our upper atmosphere. Consequently, those impacted molecules produce energy that they release as photons, i.e. light.
When hitting the oxygen molecules at altitudes of around 60 to 190 miles (100 to 300 km) up, the aurora produces green light. Less frequent are red auroras as those are associated with more intense solar activity. They happen when scarcer oxygen molecules at higher altitudes, 180 to 250 miles (300 to 400 km), are excited by the solar radiation.
You may get blue and purple auroras if there is even more intense solar activity. Even more rare, they happen when the solar radiation penetrates to 60 miles or less. Sometimes, all those colors may mix and you will see pink and yellow auroras.
Don’t worry about that talk of radiation and high-energy particles. You are quite safe, protected by our atmosphere. However, solar storms can play havoc with artificial satellites. If you lose your GPS signal or your satellite TV at night, take a look at the sky. There may be an aurora.
Like on Earth, solar weather is somewhat unpredictable. The 11-year cycle was supposed to peak in 2025. Scientists are now predicting it to reach its zenith next year. However, we are getting some great displays already.
Astronomers are constantly monitoring the sun and know if there is a solar flare sending plasma our way. Consequently, news sites often mention beforehand that it is going to happen. However, I rely on an app called AuroraWatch UK. There are plenty more that you will find if you search your Play Store or App Store.
Often, if you see an aurora, there will be another seven days later. I have no idea why.
The nearer you are to the Earth’s poles, the more likely you are to see the aurora.
Here, in the North of England, above the 55-degree parallel, we occasionally see them. I live just about on the same latitude as Pikwitonei in Manitoba – a place so remote that the Google Street View car hasn’t been there, but it looks like a fantastic place to avoid light pollution and see them even better. The aurora isn’t very bright, so escaping from the city will help you see it. Even moonlight can hide it from view.
The Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) and Aurora Australis (Southern Lights) are impressive to observe. However, you won’t necessarily see the colors. Our eyes’ retinas detect light and comprise rods and cones. Cones detect color and don’t work well in low light. Therefore, the aurora is likely to appear as white light in the sky.
If you can see color, it is most likely going to be green. That’s because of the three primary colors: red, green, and blue. We have as many green-detecting cones as red and blue added together. That’s why those color proportions are used in the Bayer pattern of camera sensors; they mimic our retinas.
Our camera sensors can collect more light if the shutter is left open. Also, the objective lenses of our cameras are far larger than our eyes’ pupils. Therefore, they gather a greater amount of light too. This is why astronomers favor telescopes with large objective lenses over more powerful magnifications.
You will need a tripod to keep the camera steady. If your camera or lens has in-built image stabilization, the usual advice is to turn that off when on a tripod, although on my camera, I never find it necessary and leave it on auto. It’s also a good idea to use a remote trigger or set the self-timer and use the camera in silent mode (the electronic shutter) to prevent any camera movement.
Ideally, you want a fast lens set with its widest aperture. It should have the biggest objective lens possible. I used the OM System M.Zuiko 12-40mm F2.8 PRO lens, shooting wide open at 12mm. My M.Zuiko 7-14mm F/2.8 PRO lens would have sufficed equally well. A short f/1.4 prime lens would have been even better.
As with everything in photography, there is a compromise to be made. That wide aperture means a shallower depth of field. Therefore, the closest hyperfocal distance, the point at which you get the maximum field of sharpness is further away than it would be with a small aperture. So, if you want to combine foreground interest with the aurora, your focus point mustn’t be too close to your camera or the aurora and the stars will be unsharp, unless you employ focus stacking, that is.
Conversely, if you are using a wide angle lens, that gives you more depth of field, which works to your benefit.
An app like PhotoPills will help you to calculate the hyperfocal distance. You can, of course, focus beyond that distance, and even on the aurora or stars, but more of the foreground will be blurred as a result.
I generally use manual focus, relying on the focus assistance that highlights the in-focus area. When it’s very dark, I use a torch to illuminate something at or beyond the hyperfocal distance.
The aurora moves. Fortunately, it does not appear to be moving that quickly where I am because I am farther south. So, a shutter speed of 8-10 seconds using a wide angle lens gives me a good resolution of it. If you are closer to the aurora, i.e. closer to one of the Earth’s poles, it will appear to be moving faster. Therefore, you may need a faster shutter. Fortunately, it will also be brighter too.
Either way, the shutter and aperture combination may not be enough to expose the image correctly, so increasing the ISO may be necessary.
This highlights the importance of reducing ambient light, which can overexpose all or parts of your picture. As I mentioned, a moonless night and shooting well away from streetlights is ideal.
Also, it’s worth noting that if your shutter is open for too long then stars in your picture will start to elongate because of the rotation of the earth, although you probably won’t have to worry about it.
As a rule of thumb, you can apply the 500 rule to ensure stars remain as points and not lines in your photo. For a 35mm sensor camera, divide 500 by the focal length of the lens. So, for a 25mm lens, you would have a maximum exposure of 20 seconds. That may be too long for shooting the aurora anyway and you will want a shorter shutter speed to stop movement blur.
With a Micro Four Thirds camera using a 25mm lens, you would halve that time to 10 seconds. That would be about the right shutter length for me to capture the aurora, anyway, although I used a 12mm focal length, so in theory, I can have the shutter open for over 20 seconds without elongating the stars. But, that is far longer than I would want for the aurora because it would show movement blur.
Of course, increasing the ISO will increase noise, especially with longer exposures. Fortunately, newer sensor technology in contemporary digital cameras helps keep noise levels to a minimum, and modern noise reduction such as those found in DxO PhotoLab, ON1, Topaz AI, and Lightroom is incredible for giving clean sharp images.
This comes back to where I started. The sensor has collected a lot of raw data, that is, if you are shooting raw, and I advise that you do. That data, when it is turned into a picture you can view in your camera, has been processed. The clever technicians behind your camera’s software decide what your picture should look like. However, the technicians who work for your camera company are not the same as the people who work for Adobe, nor are they the same people who work for DxO, Capture One, ON1, and so forth. They will all interpret your photo differently.
Which of them is right?
All of them and none of them are. Similarly, if you want to adjust the photo to appear how you want it to be, it’s entirely up to you. If you want to increase the saturation of the colors or turn it to black and white, or if you want to rely on those camera technicians’ interpretation of reality, it’s entirely up to you. Any variation of how the raw data is displayed is equally valid. Develop it how you like. Anyone who criticizes your choice – and I have seen some ill-natured criticisms about others’ photos on Facebook – then they are just showing their own lack of understanding.
If someone else likes it, great. If they don’t, then that’s only their subjective viewpoint being different from yours. What is invalid is saying that your interpretation of the raw data is wrong, unless they accept that every other photo is equally wrong.
Personally, I find the nighttime landscape and aurora images straight out of all cameras look too flat for my taste. Therefore, some adjustments, especially to the tonal contrasts, are needed. I also increase the brightness of shadows in the foreground and reduce the brightness of the highlights. Then, I like to increase the brightness (not the saturation) of the aurora’s colors to make them stand out. Nighttime photos can also stand a lot more mid-tone contrast than daytime shots.
A 200-year-old beloved tree in northern England, was vandalized and cut down this week. One photographer shares what the Sycamore Gap tree meant to him.
The alliance announced this week between Art Basel and the Tribeca Festival epitomizes how innovative partnerships can propel a brand into new realms of influence, while preserving established identities.
Drawing more than 16,000 attendees in the 1970s at its inception in Basel, Switzerland, Art Basel is now a global pilgrimage for hundreds of thousands of art world disciples with shows in Paris, Hong Kong and Miami. This year’s event will take place Dec. 8-10 at the Miami Beach Convention Center, but extends beyond the beach into the city with brand partners including UBS, BMW, Louis Vuitton and NetJets.
During the same week as Art Basel, the partnership with Tribeca Festival will bring in a series of live events, including performances, DJ sets and conversations with creative visionaries, at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden.
“Our new partnership with Art Basel is the next frontier to explore the power of storytelling in unconventional ways,” said Tribeca co-founder and CEO Jane Rosenthal in a statement. “Art is ubiquitous and expressed via so many creative avenues, from film to music to immersive exhibits.”
This partnership is also a roadmap for the marketing industry, showcasing how joining forces can catalyze growth and enhance market dominance in ways competitive isolation can’t.
“As we map the next chapter of our business, we are focused on elevating and innovating our offering at our world-class shows and year-round platforms, and creating new opportunities within and beyond the arts ecosystem,” said Art Basel chief growth officer Hayley Romer.
With the world becoming ever more digital, and narratives are told through mediums outside of traditional gallery experiences, there is a growth challenge for cultural events like Art Basel and Tribeca. Both brands intend to use this partnership to merge cultural worlds and expand their reach without sacrificing the integrity of either.
Art Basel is no stranger to creative collaborations or exploring partnerships to spur growth. In 2015, the event partnered with BMW on The BMW Art Journey, a collaboration created to highlight and support emerging artists. The event also launched the UBS Junior Art Hub, a partnership that offers free art sessions to children who attend their Hong Kong show.
In its work with Kickstarter, Art Basel amplified projects by nonprofit visual arts organizations worldwide, reinforcing the brand’s identity and expanding its reach into new territories and audiences.
As industries evolve unrelentingly, modern CMOs and marketing executives must leverage a similar approach in growing the brands they steward. Trying to build new offerings in isolation to meet increasing consumer demands presents significant risks in either seeming inauthentic to new audiences or an act of betrayal to existing ones.
Harnessing the potential of emerging markets means harnessing the potential in strategic alliances. This approach fuels robust growth and fortifies brand integrity while building trust by proximity to your partner.
By merging the realms of art, film and culture, this partnership enriches the creative ecosystem and sets a precedent of growth.
Where results can be limited to the capacity of individual resources, combining resources through alliances allows for those limits to be extended far beyond anticipation.
The Tribeca Festival, one of the world’s most influential platforms, marries beautifully with Art Basel’s intentions of maintaining its standing as the leading fair of its kind. This partnership demonstrates to the rest of the industry the possibilities and mutual benefits such collaborations harbor, urging a more open, innovative and interconnected future.
Hi there! My name is Aletheia Sandley, and I’m a photographer here at Ram Page, which should be a pretty good indicator that I’m not much of a writer, but regardless, it never hurts to do a little writing from time to time. Despite how funny and honestly ridiculous the story may seem, a “surprise” led me to ASU.
Angelo State wasn’t my first choice. This is due in part to the fact that my brother also attends ASU, and I wasn’t too keen on following him. I very much wanted to be my own person and do something different than what my brother was doing. So I of course applied, but kept my options open, applying to several other colleges, most notably ones that were closer to home. As I started narrowing down my options, it ended up being the two schools that were closest. Then an intrusive thought and a snack changed all that.
I bought myself a Kinder Surprise Egg, uncharacteristically, and waited until I got home to open it and see what toy I had gotten. Wouldn’t you know, there was a tiny little ram inside the egg. That very same toy now sits in my dorm window. To put it simply, I had let a Kinder Egg pick which school I was going to. The egg chose my fate. Funnily enough, my favorite colors are blue and yellow.
As for how I found the Ram Page, my entire family had always been on the more creative side, and I was always encouraged to pursue my interests in the arts, particularly painting and most notably photography. As I got older I went through a lot of hobbies, but the only thing that has stuck has been my passion for the arts. I wanted to avoid having to go back into the customer service industry, which brought me to look for a job I could do on campus. This was of course ideal because of scheduling and I would also be more likely to get a job that would be of a genuine interest to me.
With my brother having already attended ASU for two years, he of course felt the need to chime in, he had an idea for a job that he thought would be of interest to me. He had mentioned to me that there was a job opening at the Ram Page for a photographer. This was exciting news for me as I had always wanted to pursue photography as a potential career. This was an opportunity to put my skills to actual use, something more than the occasional recreational photoshoot.
In terms of my actual career plans for the future, I can’t say they resemble what my current job choice is. As of the moment that I am writing this, I’m a kinesiology major. Which I’ll go ahead and define for the vast majority of people who don’t know what that is.
Kinesiology, to put it simply, is the general study of human movement and exercise. It covers a broad range of sub-disciplines, including biomechanics, exercise science and performing arts. Like anyone majoring in kinesiology, I already have my mind mostly set on what I intend to do with the degree, though my indecisiveness might change that.
My personal career goals are to eventually be a coach and athletic trainer at the collegiate level. Unlike most, I have no intention of rushing this process, I want to experience every little bit of the career choice. If I’m going to be doing the same thing for the rest of my life, I want to make sure that it’s the right thing for me and that I experience the full spectrum of it. I’m one of those weird people that actually likes to learn new things and the process of learning about them, as well.
