Tuesday, September 9, 2008

James Cohan in Shanghai



James Cohan Gallery from Chelsea has opened in Shanghai, the brainchild of its gallery director Arthur Solway who is in love with everything Chinese. I wandered over to the new space in the French Concession, far from Moganshan Lu, the official gallery district in Shanghai. The place had its colonalist charms with lots of fireplaces, moldings and modernist design touches throughout. Its current show, Yinka Shonibare, was kind of perfect for the setting, given this artist's own obsession with colonialist history, but I kept wondering who in Shanghai would really care about the London-based Nigerian born artist or would make heads or tails of his African textiles. China, after all, has a very different relationship to Africa.


Arthur wasn't in, though I ran into him getting out of a cab, which I immediately jumped into on my way to the ShContemporary art fair. At the fair, James Cohan's booth had Shonibare, plus all western artists, probably the most western packed booth at the fair. I wonder how they will do with this stuff in China where the collectors still seemed most interested in Chinese artists.


No comments: