Navin Rawanchaikul, an ethnic East Asian Indian artist born in Thailand, is the creator of an exhibition titled Super China! at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing that humorously critiques and dissects the formerly white-hot Chinese art world. The Ullens Center is a private enterprise owned by Belgian art collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens, and is staffed by curators from France, the United States, Bulgaria, and China. As a born-and-bred New Yorker who lives between Beijing and Bushwick, Brooklyn, I too am part of a melange of floating cultures.

First I will briefly highlight Rawanchaikul’s background and art practice, and then I will discuss Super China! in light of the rise of the Chinese art world. Finally, I want to discuss why this show is so relevant at this time and what it bodes for the future.

THE ARTIST

Navin Rawanchaikul was born in 1971 in Chiang Mai, Thailand, of parents from the Hindu-Punjabi communities of present day Pakistan. He describes himself as the “lonesome son of [the] diaspora and [the] product of a globalized world,”1 and his main art practice engages the public in nontraditional ways through presenting documentary and fictitious aspects of himself. He is a cross between a systems analyst, a huckster, a country boy, a movie producer, and an international buffoon, one who is so savvy with the manipulation of his image that he runs his own production company, Navin Productions, to manage it. He has direct experience of how one’s origins get diluted in this new world culture—he is married to a Japanese woman and splits his time among Thailand, Japan, and the rest of the world. In his position as the consummate pan-Asian outsider, he has analysed the base of power in the art world and who the key players are in any given national situation. At the same time, he has managed to engage a new, non-art community with his work by creating site-specific projects outside of galleries and museums through the use of taxi cabs, billboards, comic books, and outdoor pavilions. He provides a fresh perspective on the role of the artist in rapidly developing countries, and some of the questions his projects raise are: In learning a new language, do you adopt its values and customs? Or, in adopting new techniques and methodologies, do you become more like the customs you are adopting? In an increasingly globalized art world of art fairs, auctions, biennials, and triennials, these are serious questions. Rawanchaikul answers them by working both sides of the game of success in the art world and by critiquing the art system, while at the same time retaining complete creative control of his contemporary critical products.

FLY WITH ME TO ANOTHER WORLD

In the early 1960s, few Thai artists studied and lived abroad. In 1962 Inson Wongsam, a recent art school graduate from Lamphun, took his Lambretta scooter and rode from Thailand to Europe bartering his woodcut prints for room and board, and eventually making it all the way, minus scooter, to New York City. Thirteen years later, he returned home a local legend saying, “I left with nothing and I returned with nothing.” However, he began using his newfound knowledge of Western art practices for art projects within his own community. In 1999, Rawanchaikul produced a series of billboard paintings and gathered interviews, news clippings, and old photos to make a scrapbook about Inson’s life, in honour of a pioneer who had become so important to the fledgling Thai art world. The exhibit, which also included a replica fibreglass sculpture of Inson riding his famed scooter around the world, travelled to different countries, ending up in Inson’s hometown in 2005. Invited to the Art Statement section for emerging artists of the 31st Art Basel, Rawanchaikul also included his now signature billboard painting of Inson’s journey, titled Fly With Me To Another World, along with the fibreglass sculpture and scrapbook.

The use of the billboard, a familiar Indian Bollywood device of hyperdramatic promotion and occasional propaganda, and also popular in Thailand, is one of the most direct forms of advertising and communication yet is consistently relegated to the level of “low” art. Yet, for many semiliterate and illiterate people, it is one of the most accessible and engaging forms of receiving information. As the art world became increasingly theoretical and distanced from the general public, Rawanchaikul considered the telling of any one individual’s story through the format of a billboard an act of resistance.

TAXI GALLERY

In 1995 Rawanchaikul initiated Navin Gallery Bangkok, transforming a common Bangkok taxi into a mobile art gallery. The project was expanded for various exhibitions in Birmingham, Bonn, and Mexico City. Turning a keen eye towards the worlds of communications and advertising, Rawanchaikul brought art into the lives of ordinary people by inserting into the taxi projects by artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija and Yutaka Sone.


photo: Yutaka Sone, At the End of All the Journeys, 1998, video. Installation view at Navin Gallery Bangkok (Taxi Gallery), Bangkok.

The idea of the traditional art audience was challenged because there was no way of guaranteeing any one particular location for viewing the artwork at any one particular time. The difficulty of obtaining a glimpse of the art added to the appeal and mystery of the project, but also made it a space where those fortunate enough to hail that particular taxi would find themselves encircled by art at a level that was impossible to ignore, either from the surroundsound aspect of the images or the fact that the viewer might be stuck inside the cab in rush hour traffic. Another way in which Rawanchaikul worked on deconstructing the contemporary art power structure was to produce a series of highly accessible comic books about the lives of different taxi drivers. By using the taxis as a venue for art, he was mounting what he called in his book, Navin’s Sala (an elaborate, multifaceted textual and visual survey of his many projects), a continuous “Taxi Evernnale” with the slogan of “Any Where, Any Time, Any Taxi.” This project entails both participatory art and cultural politics, and is subversive in that it challenges the primacy of the museum, the expert, the scholar, and the entire art hierarchy—an arena that Rawanchaikul probes in depth.

SALA AND THE SUPER(M)ART

Rawanchaikul also focuses on the concept of the ubiquitous Sala, a Thai open-air pavilion with a basic wooden frame that is used as a place for everyone in the village to congregate. It often fills in as a space for important functions. This idea of a community gathering led to his exhibit Super(M)art, at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2002, where he demonstrated his burgeoning criticism of the role of the curator in promoting the overt and blatant commodification of art. Within this context, Rawanchaikul fabricated a sculpture of himself in the form of Old Navin, eighty-three years old, wondering if his work will ever be on permanent display, and negotiating with Young Curator Man about this problem. Set in 2052, Young Curator Man is slick; he understands the value of creating distraction and promotes a model for biennial franchising. Super Curator, who has ultimate power, represents all Young Curator Men with promises to make anyone into a Super(M)Artistic Guru, because art is over and it is time for Art-to(M)art. In the advertising literature Navin produces for Navin’s Sala, he promotes the training course Super(M)art 101, which will “take you from being a starving painter to a mass producer of wealth and fame in no time.” He also has an ad in the book selling a version of Super(M)artistic Curator, Super(M)artistic Gallerist, Super(M)artistic Critic, or his pretend best-selling product, Super(M)artistic CEO which you can purchase at www.super(M)art101.com.

Rawanchaikul’s work continually explores the complex interrelations among artists, media, curators, collectors, gallery owners, museums, real estate moguls, and politics. He produced large billboard-sized paintings of Western and Eastern Feasts of Super(M)art, each populated with up to two hundred art world luminaries such as Art or (M)art? (2002) and Super(m)art—Bangkok Survivors, 2004. These theatrical scenarios are a cross between the Last Supper of Christ and the children’s book Where’s Waldo? The Byzantine-like paintings highlight the dynamics of the art world game as played out in different localities. In the West, it’s all about competition and rising to the top of a canonical list. In Thailand, where they are still struggling to create an art infrastructure, it’s more about who benefits and who does not. Rawanchaikul also developed these relationships into board games, building upon his reworking of the art world game and showing the necessary and complex relationships among all the players.

IN CHINA

Rawanchaikul started his own mock political Navin Party because despite his success as an artist he felt there was still no place for him in a globalized world. He was particularly devastated and fell into a state of depression—in Navin’s Sala, Rawanchaikul describes how he broke up with his dealer, went into debt, and started drinking—when in May, 2001 the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission decided to cancel his New York based Taxi Gallery project because they deemed his proposal to alter the
taxi interiors inappropriate.

In 2006, Rawanchaikul found a letter in his studio from someone living in Mumbai who shared his name of Navin. He then found another Navin, Guru Navin Mahaprabhu, who told him to find the Navins of the past and bring them together with the Navins of the future, and this would make him whole again. He became inspired and founded the Navin Party. In June 2006, Mumbai director Naren Mojidra was commissioned to direct a short musical film, Navins of Bollywood, and he opened a Web site devoted to the Navin Party (www.navinparty.com). To commemorate the founding of “Friends of the Navin Party,” the Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Yuko Hasegawa, and the Thai Ministry of Culture Director-General, Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, Apinan Poshyananda, signed a Thai-Japanese joint statement of support for the Navin Party.


photo: Navin Rawanchaikul, Young Curator Man, 2002, painted fiberglass. Photo: Ellen Pearlman. Courtesy of the artist.

Beijing was chosen as the site of the Navin Party’s Ninth Congress. Special propaganda prints were released saying “Let the Navins of the World Unite Humanity and Bring Hope for the Future,” which was based upon the work of Dalian artist Yu Zhenli. In addition, Rawanchaikul distributed the small red book, Quotations from Chairman Navin, near Wan Fu Jing market, where he was stopped and arrested by the police on August 1, 2007, only to be released after five hours of questioning. Later that month he showed a video of quotations from “Comrade Navin” at Tang Contemporary Gallery titled All Navins Are Comrades, All Non-Navins Are Friends.

SUPER CHINA!

Rawanchaikul’s current show at the Ullens Center is not a retrospective and mainly focuses on his views of the art world in China, with the addition of other pieces to present a more balanced presentation of his oeuvre. The Ullens Center is broadening its scope by incorporating Asians who comment on Asia instead of presenting the typical Western commentaries on Asian art or, conversely, solely presenting Western artists. Art institutions have become de facto sites for the promotion and values of a society’s ideas; therefore, public venues, particularly a European based arts centre in China, have a lot of responsibility for what and how they present work. Some may feel that only the Chinese are qualified to comment on and critique the Chinese art world, but in the current globalized environment this is not true. I have met Chinese artists in Beijing and two weeks later bumped into them at exhibitions at PS1 in New York, so strict localization is no longer relevant. What Rawanchaikul has undertaken is to excoriate the art world, and, in this instance, the Chinese art world. Part of the way he has done this in the Ullens Center exhibition is through a participatory game, also titled SUPER CHINA!, which is loosely based on the board game Monopoly. Another way is through a Bollywood-style billboard painting portraying power players within the Chinese art world.

I played the board game SUPER CHINA! along with three Chinese participants. As an individual reasonably knowledgeable about the Chinese art world, I was occasionally stymied by the questions, but no more so than anyone else who was playing.


photo: Navin Rawanchaikul, Quotations from Comrade Navin, 2008, ceramic and book set. Produced in collaboration with Galerie Enrico Navarra in celebration of the Navin Party’s second anniversary, 2008. Photo: Suwat Supachavinswad. Courtesy of Navin Production and Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris.

The purpose of the game is to survive within the art world and make the most money. Just as in the traditional game of Monopoly, you can buy property but you have the choice to turn it into, for instance, an art gallery or a palace, represented by little chess-like pieces you place on your section of the board. There are tax traps and rent collections if someone else lands on your property. If you are unfortunate enough to draw a card that says “A Super Gallerist hates you,” you have to pay all the other players one thousand dollars in order to continue playing the game. The cards include “Super Press,” where you don’t pay when landing on a media space; “Super Gallerist,” where you take a fifty percent cut of every player’s salary each time he or she collects a fee; “Super Contractor,” who helps you buy a gallery at a fifty percent discount; and “Super Artist,” who places a token on your property and doubles your revenue fee. One example of the type of questions asked on the cards to gain extra credits or money is:

“Who wrote an article entitled ‘Do Westerners Really Understand the Chinese Avant Garde Art’”?

A) Pi Li
B) Li Xianting
C) Zhu Qi

How many of you reading this article know that the answer is “C”? This is esoteric stuff to put out to a typical museum-going public, and playing the game for an hour at a time makes for a considerable amount of participatory leisure. Still, I was surprised by how engaging it was and how thrilled I was when I could avoid paying taxes, paying rent for temporarily residing on other people’s property, and, best of all, collecting rent whenever someone landed on my property. At the end of the game, I even received an Olympic-sized medal to wear around my neck from the Ullens Center and Navin Productions that stated I had joined the Super China “Survival Art Corp.” But what does this have to do with the art world? It teaches and highlights the skills, cunningness, and tactical moves you require in order to get ahead in the art world.


photo: Navin Rawanchaikul, installation view of SUPER CHINA!. Photo: Oak Taylor-Smith. Courtesy of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

Rawanchaikul’s painting, also titled SUPER CHINA!, includes larger-than-life portraits that make up an insider’s who’s who of the contemporary Chinese art world according to a loosely polled opinion of what is likely “Friends of Navin’s” and important but unnamed others. Seven panels long with approximately thirty persons per panel, it is compositionally similar to the other billboards he has produced in the past, such as the one of the members of his own Navin Party. I could recognize, among many others, Huang Rui, Uli Sigg, Fan Li Jun, Melissa Chiu, Guy and Myriam Ullens, Zhuan Huang, Jérôme Sans, Cai Guo-Qiang, Xu Bing, and Ai Weiwei. There were also the fibreglass statues of both “Curator Man,” with his cell phone glued to his ear, and “Old Navin,” as well as the painted fibreglass sculpture of Rawanchaikul on Inson Wongsam’s Lambretta scooter. I especially appreciated a wall cartoon of the appropriately named little Italian/Chinese “Super Mafia” guy wearing a chocolate brown fedora hat and looking quite sinister, saying, inside a cartoon bubble, “In the art world, who you know is just as important as what you know. We are the Super China! Network. You’ll need our help to win.” Rawanchaikul certainly got that right.

This exhibition also asks what the purpose of art is in a local community as opposed to that of the anonymous super sales engine behind a capitalist society that buys and sells precious works of art. Society in the SUPER CHINA! painting represents local or legendary heroes and preserves a specific type of knowledge, one that immortalizes these local heroes through its visual display. Especially now, the artist in society is elevated to an almost holy status, and this power works in tandem with the art world’s financial engine. In the art world, the race is always on to see which curator or critic discovers an art movement or a new artist first and then makes sure that the discovery is the next new sensation, thereby winning the
“real” art world game. This is also the logic behind cannibalizing and consuming each year’s crop of freshly minted M.F.A. students from top art schools around the globe by giving them exhibitions and wooing them with deals. But are artists just cash cows, or do they contribute to the life and vigour of society? Does anyone care anymore? The new, challenging financial times that are facing us just might rewrite the rules.

The benign way of looking at this is to consider art as a social platform for meeting, sharing, and learning. It records the history and sociology of the moment. It’s true that gallerists need to be friends with collectors, sponsors, city officers, and even the “Super Mafia.” They also have to have luck, savvy, networking skills, money, and, it is hoped, something worth selling. Ultimately the skill of how to play the game successfully is the difference between connecting to a small group of people and connecting with a community.

A LINE IN THE SAND

The mounting of the exhibition Super China! comes at an especially delicate time in both the Chinese and the broader art world. The boom is over, the market is off, sales are down, galleries are closing, and there is general retrenchment. The “Art Mafia” has been enervated, and though “Super Curator Man” still works, he does so on a strict economy class budget, forgoing his customary first class seats during his curtailed schedule of international jaunts and parties.

There has been a growing critical chorus or backlash against the Chinese art world in the Western media. Part of this is justified, and part of it comes from lack of exposure to the full scope of what is actually going on in contemporary Chinese art. Most of the criticism has focused on the big players in the art and auction markets and the ability of artists to actually buy favourable critical reviews, museum shows, and, if necessary, to re-purchase their own works to drive up auction prices. This is where media coverage gets the most bang for its buck. In the West, no matter how knowledgeable the viewer, Chinese art tends to be considered a subset of art from “other” worlds, like Russian, Indian, or even Scandinavian art, despite the whopping success of the Cai Guo-Qiang show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. America, Great Britain, Germany, and Japan are still critical main players, and I have heard curators and editors of major art publications say that there is nothing interesting in Chinese art—it’s all a copy of the West, and what is the big deal, anyway? It is impossible for me to explain how varied and even experimental Chinese art is to them, and I typically reply that only by taking a trip to China could they even begin to get an idea.

Rawanchaikul’s Super China! is a full-blown, albeit humorous, look at the mythmakers and masters behind the meteoric rise of the Chinese art market over the past decade.


photo: Navin Rawanchaikul, SUPER CHINA! (detail), 2009, acrylic on canvas, 270 x 1260 cm. Photo: Oak Taylor-Smith. Courtesy of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.

It is not a commentary on the value and worth of any particular artist or trend. Rawanchaikul trades on common insider knowledge and, like a research social scientist, maps the connectivity and hierarchical curve of the years he examines. The topic of dismantling the art hierarchy has particularly sensitive reverberations in China, which is still recuperating from the evisceration of any allowable art world or hierarchy, including any type of art criticism or production of images that were not approved by the State during the turbulent 1960s and 70s. Art disrupts and subverts the monotony of our daily routines, but, apparently, so did the State at that time, and in ways that no artist could have expected. But once a movement is analyzed and categorized, it composes its own swan song. The recent boom phase of the Chinese art world is over. A line in the sand has been drawn. Cynical Realism, Political Pop, gigantic blockbuster installations, painted fibreglass, McDonald’s, Disney, Mao, fibreglass pigs with multiple teats, wide-eyed little girls, Communist Party uniforms, puffy clouds and angel wings, women tied up bound and teary-eyed, and Olympic fervour are all finished. Over.

What is emerging is the big question on everyone’s mind. In the postapocalyptic market hiatus, fresh insights and new horizons are peering out from behind the rubble of the decimated markets—but what are they? Stay tuned.

photo (top): Navin Rawanchaikul, installation view of Fly with Me to Another World, 2004-05, Hariphunchai National Museum, Lamphun. Photo: Suwat Supachavinswad. Courtesy of the artist.

NOTES
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1. Navin’s Sala (Chiang Mai: Navin Production Co., Ltd./ Paris: Galerie Enrico Navarra, 2008).


AUTHOR'S BIO

Ellen Pearlman is a writer, curator, filmmaker, and professor based in Brooklyn and Beijing. She is Artistic Director of YuanFen Gallery, the first gallery of new media art in Beijing, and Editor-at-large for The Brooklyn Rail. Most recently she was in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, on a Prince Claus Trust Grant working with the Blue Sun Artist Group to create a site-specific performance that featured a campaign for presidency under the banner of the fictitious Art Party.


This review was first published in Yishu in July 2009. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents at www.yishujournal.com.