The Chinese art scene last year was eventful, fascinating and yet controversial.

This can be seen by a survey released following the 2000 Chinese Art Elites Annual Conference in Chengdu, the capital of Southwest China's Sichuan Province. The report selected the most influential events, the most noticeable people and the most active organizations on the art stage within China last year.

The meeting and survey were organized by the "Art and Artists" programme of the China Central Television (CCTV) together with the Chengdu Museum of Modern Art and the website art-w.com.

The nationwide survey was carried out among art experts in December and last month and found that most art events in China happen in national and international art centers such as Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

The Shanghai Biennale 2000 was unanimously agreed to be the most significant exhibition in China's contemporary art world last year. The Biennale also topped the list in another poll organized by the art website CL2000.com.

The country's first major official modern art show since the 1990s, the Biennale took place from November 6 until January 6 at the newly renovated Shanghai Art Museum. Installations, videos, performances, photography and even architectural works made the debuts in the Biennale.

Praised as a door-opener and "a milestone in Chinese modern art history" by Zhu Qingsheng, an art professor at Peking University, the success of the show demonstrates the increasing cultural openness of modern China amid the age of globalization.

Primarily because of the Biennale's success and significance, its curators Hou Hanru, Zhang Qing and Li Xu were selected as the year's best Chinese curators and the Shanghai Art Museum was declared the best Chinese art museum in 2000.

Following the Shanghai Biennale, a number of other "biennales" have taken place in China, including the Shenzhen Biennale of ink painting and the Qingdao Biennale of prints. But none of them was as influential as the Shanghai one.

Impressed by the worldwide influence of the Shanghai Biennale, the Chengdu Museum of Modern Art announced it will organize a "Chengdu Biennale" starting this year to compete with Shanghai. The show will mainly focus on emerging young artists, the museum said.

The Chengdu museum made its name last January for hosting the exhibition "Centennial Gate," which featured works by more than 200 Chinese artists in the categories of oil painting, sculpture and installation, ink painting, and calligraphy.

Looking at Chinese art from 1979-99, following the "Centennial Gate," a number of large-scale retrospective exhibitions were held across the country around the turn of the new millennium. They included the "Chinese Oil Painting in the 20th Century" show in Beijing, the "Chinese Prints in the Past 100 Years" show in Chongqing, the "Grand Exhibition of New Chinese Painting" in Shanghai and the "Grand Exhibition of Chinese Calligraphy in the Past 1,000 Years" in Beijing.

Among the most popular art exhibitions last year were the Dunhuang art exhibition and solo shows by Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali and British modern sculptor Henry Moore.

The Dunhuang show highlighted the grandeur of art treasures in the Dunhuang grottoes in Northwest China while unfolding their bitter history. The Dali and Moore shows, however, enabled Chinese art lovers to have a dialogue with these world masters up close.

Also notable last year were three art fairs held in Beijing (August), Shanghai (November) and Guangzhou (December).

Noticeably, as part of the 2000 China Art Exposition in Beijing, the Chinese Art Industry Forum 2000 touched on topics such as public art, art and the Internet, art collecting and art investing, the art market and art media.

"Art as an industry has emerged into the public eye in recent years," said forum organizer Wu Jing. "It has become necessary to examine the challenges and opportunities facing the industry."

In 2000, domestic collectors stood out as the most dynamic players in the Chinese art market, suggesting the great potential and growing maturity of the domestic market.

During the Shanghai Art Fair, a sculpture in Rodin's "Thinker" series was purchased by a Shanghai company for 10 million yuan (US1.2 million). In April, the China Poly Group in Beijing bought at a Hong Kong auction four precious relic and art treasures looted by British and French soldiers from Yuanmingyuan (the Old Summer Palace) 140 years ago. Also last year, Shanghai collector Chen Bangke and his company made news by collecting paintings by Western masters Picasso and Chagall.

But disorderly practices such as underground sales, tax evasion and art fabrication in the Chinese art market remain a headache, experts say. A sensational scandal last year was that the 70-plus works in a solo ink painting exhibition of master Chinese artist Fu Baoshi (1904-65), staged at the Shanghai Museum, were found all to be fake.

One of the most encouraging new phenomena of 2000 was the emergence of a number of Chinese art websites that have attracted art lovers and specialists from home and abroad. Among them are china-gallery.com, CL2000.com, guaweb.com.cn, tom.com, art-w.com, artnews.com.cn and chinese-art.com. Among them, chinese-art.com is in English while china-gallery.com and CL2000.com have both Chinese and English editions.

Last year, Chinese artists showed a growing interest in the computer and the Internet. Computer art and even "Internet art" have entered the sight of more Chinese artists and are becoming gradually accepted by the masses.

New York-based Chinese artist Cai Guoqiang became a household name in China last year, although he has been well-established in the Western art community since 1995. In the survey, he tops a list of the most eye-catching Chinese artists of the year which also includes Liu Xiaodong, Zhao Bandi, Zhou Chunya and Mao Yan.

Cai became the focus of national attention because his award-winning installation and performance project "Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard" in the 48th Venice Biennale was accused by the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts of infringing upon the copyright of a similar sculptural work produced in Sichuan in the 1960s. The original work, "Rent Collection Courtyard," showing peasants paying tithes to the feudal lord, was a representative piece of Chinese socialist art.

The dispute, later focused on whether the Sichuan academy has the copyright for the sculpture and whether there was a misunderstanding of Cai's work, has no result so far. However, it has initiated heated discussions among China's art circles on how to interpret contemporary conceptual art and how to deal with copyright issues of artwork in a modern era.

To the surprise of many, veteran Chinese painters Wu Guanzhong and Zhang Ding, who started a nationwide debate on what traditional techniques and materials mean in new Chinese painting, missed the list.

Advocating freedom and novelty in art creation, the radical Wu criticized traditional techniques in Chinese painting in a new age. Zhang, on the contrary, argued that such elements are the "bottomline" that makes Chinese painting what it is.

The survey found that Xia Junna, 30, was the most prominent emerging Chinese artist of the year. The female oil painter, noted for her expressive images of young women and flowers, has been remarkably successful in recent years.

According to the survey, the Shanghai Art Museum, the Chengdu Museum of Modern Art, the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, the Shanghe Art Museum in Chengdu, and the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen were the best Chinese art museums of the year.

Beijing art museums such as the China National Art Museum and the Yanhuang Art Museum were not included.

"This, in a way, indicates that the facilities and management of art museums in the Chinese capital need to improve urgently," said Han Ming, a Beijing art critic.

(China Daily 02/12/2001)