November 2008

In this month's issue

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

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‘My family had no interest in art, but collecting is in my genes’, he explains. ‘My grandfather collected porcelain dalmatians; my father racehorses. During my first holiday in Hong Kong after I went to boarding school my aunt took me to the first solo show in Hong Kong of Zhang Daqian because everyone was talking about it. I thought it was amazing. He was the first Chinese artist to bring a sense of revolution to traditional ink painting. He still used ink and scroll but he brought colour – an amazing blue, magenta, green. Suddenly there was perspective too, three-dimensions.’

‘Many years later I was able to afford to buy something by him, and it hangs over my bed now (Fig. 4). I had just seen the Glenn Miller film with James Stewart – Miller bought his trombone by instalment. That is exactly what I asked to do. After a few months, I proudly brought the painting home and I spent a lot of time deciding how to mount it and frame it, and finding the right space for it. It was then I realised that this was something I wanted to do.’ He bought the painting from Tsong-zung Chang, the start of a long and fruitful friendship.

In the mid 1980s, Chang was organising exhibitions not only of artists working in ink and wash on paper but also of the avant-garde who addressed the realities of post-Mao China, although no real market for them then existed. In 1989 came a show marking the first 10 years of the Stars Group, the self-professed individualists who defied state dictates to demand freedom of expression and who, when denied official exhibition space in the China Art Gallery, famously hung their paintings and sculpture on the railings outside. They went on to organise a protest march in the name of individual human rights on the 30th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. When they were allowed to exhibit at the China Art Gallery, nearly 200,000 people came to take a look.

‘After the June 4th Incident in Tian’anmen Square in 1989 suddenly everything went dead for two years and artists retreated back to their homes,’ explains Chang ‘but when I started visiting them I realised that something very different was happening. It was at this time that David and I started looking at things for the China Club, and this is why he has some of the most important work by this generation of artists.’