January 2009

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Climbing the grand spiralling staircase of the China Club in Hong Kong is like drawing a cork on the history of modern and contemporary Chinese painting (Fig. 2). Every wall of this elegant three-storey stairwell at the top of the former Bank of China building is hung cheek-by-jowl with 20th-century works of art. Lining the lower levels are academic paintings in the newly introduced technique of western oil painting – portraits, figure studies, landscapes, still lifes. Climb further and these familiar, conventional images give way to the bold, iconoclastic works of the post-Tian’anmen Chinese avant-garde.

Here are works by such artists as the ‘Political Pop’ painter Wang Guangyi, who combines the visual language of Communist propaganda posters with the logos of the international brands just entering the Chinese market. Today’s art-market darlings are represented by paintings from their most famous series – not least Zhang Xiaogang’s Bloodline and Zeng Fanzhi’s Mask series. An early Fang Lijun (Fig. 7), one of three paintings the Cynical Realist painter took seven years to execute, is undoubtedly among his best, and I defy anyone not to stop dead in their tracks beside Han Lei’s photograph, taken at a Daoist exorcism, of a bloodied peasant-priest who stands with a meat-cleaver through his skull (Fig. 3).

The journey continues through the club’s labyrinth of corridors, bars and private dining rooms with ink paintings and oils, photography and prints punctuated by witty juxtapositions of sculpture. It concludes back at the foot of the stairs, at the final flourish of the bannister rail, with a large, round full stop in the form of one of Liu Jianhua’s enormous circular polychrome porcelain dishes. Inside it, five long-legged but headless and armless female figures clad in traditional Chinese silk cheongsams sit or lie prostrate. This stereotypical Chinese exoticism is served up with added humour: the piece is transformed into a fish bowl, and unheeding goldfish swim around the gleaming porcelain legs and torsos. It is clear that Sir David Tang, the China Club’s creator, is an unusually wide-ranging, highly eclectic collector, and that he enjoys art enormously.

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