Because I write about art I am privileged and can gain access to artists and their studios when many travellers cannot. I also wanted to better understand Chinese contemporary art in Shanghai. I have trawled through capacious museums in an attempt to understand and demystify the curious activity that is art. I have been visiting China annually for a decade or more mainly Beijing and Shanghai but always with an art- focused agenda, to see contemporary art in Shanghai and in China in general – and write about artists and their studios – emerging artists as well as those who have become fixtures on the international art stage. The location is such a secret that taxi drivers do not know it exists. The owner is old and sick and the only other estate tenant apart from Feng is an herbalist brought over from Taiwan and an old horse sheltering in a disintegrating corrugated iron shed. There was a dream to turn it into an art space, thus Feng’s tenure. Now the estate is privately owned by someone who does not seem to have enough money for maintenance. It is all part of the extravagance afforded to communist leaders. Each room seems to have several exit doors that lead through into more rooms where extravagant bloated furniture, a little like inflated Erwin Wurm sculptures, wait to support bodies that today will never come. There are dozens of buildings around the lake with endless corridors and cell-like rooms. On the lake is a small barge made from grubby recycled plastic bottles on which sat a Chen Wenling sculpture from his Red Boy series. His exulted position brought with it extreme privileges one of which was this estate with inside and outside tennis courts and an Olympic-sized swimming pool overlooking a huge lake. Wan Li became Vice Premier in 1984 and Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in 1988. I was on a mission to see contemporary art in Shanghai and Beijing and I had arrived at my first stop. The studio is part of a vast predominantly deserted rural estate that was once the home of Wan Li, Communist party apparatchik until he was purged during the Cultural Revolution only to be rehabilitated three years before Mao’s death in 1976. To visit artist Jin Feng’s studio beyond Beijing’s 5th Ring Road is a little like stepping back through time.
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