DSL Collection

It is a collection done by Sylvain and Dominique Levy called the DSL Collection. It is a carefully put together collection of 120 pieces of artwork from installations to paintings to videos of Chinese Contemporary Artists. It is a collection that isn't about profiting from art but solely for increasing artist exposure and educating people about Chinese Contemporary Art. So here are a selection of the artwork with commentary by Christof Buettner.

Zhou Tiehai

After having realized that he was “not on the list”, i.e. the shopping lists of Western curators touring China in the early 1990s, Zhou Tiehai set up a project to propel himself on the list. Following some self-marketing works, he introduced Joe Camel as one of the prime protagonists of his paintings until today. The Camel’s name constitutes a double bind: “Joe” comes very close to the Chinese pronunciation of “Zhou” and it is a bold adaptation of a prime icon of Western commercialism whose big nose makes for a distinctly non-Chinese appearance. Over the years, Joe Camel turned up in Zhou’s appropriations of famous Renaissance to Victorian paintings, until most recently manifesting himself in rather explicit re-creations of works of Jeff Koons and other celebrities of the 1990s.
A most notable feature of Zhou’s mode of production is not to paint by himself but to prepare computer generated blue prints, while employing assistants to do the actual work. Another feature is a conscious disregard of virtuosity in painterly execution, a style he some times calls “bad painting”. With this habits does Zhou not only make a mock of what is internationally (= in Western terms) regarded as high art, he also invented stereotypes for the complacent tastelessness of modern China’s nouveau riches.

All of these strategies create a distinct otherness, which, through constant communication via the channels of the global art circles, sets Zhou and his work apart from other artists. Today Zhou Tiehai is on top of the list."

Wang Du

It takes small wonder that the sculptures are modelled at images from a Japanese Internet porn-site. Once meant to give the onlooker power over the viewed object, now the object seems to exercise power over the viewer. This act of a re-orientation of an original gaze-intention may be a good illustration of the way Wang Du works. Based on his conviction that the media threaten to take over the definition of “reality”, Wang is a masterly manipulator of images himself. He uses illustrations from printed and electronic media from all over the world as inspiration for his installations. Wang does not regard his work as sculpture, but prefers to talk of it as three-dimensional images. He is also not interested in dealing with specific discourses. The overarching theme of his work rather is the global situation of a thorough medialization and informalization where practically every society in the world has to deal with the political and social impact of mass-media. This also means that he does not work within the framework of some kind of “Chinese” tradition although he draws a certain amount of material from Chinese sources.


Wang Guangyi


Although painted in 2004, Louis Vuitton belongs to the Grand Criticism-series that has started in 1990. To understand why a world famous artist like Wang Guangyi maintains a series over such a rather unusually long time, one needs to look into the artist’s personal history. Coming from a background that was as far removed from art, as it was poor, his outstanding talent paved his way into the Chinese Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Right from the start it was Wang’s openly declared goal to follow the general Deng Xiaoping-era dream: becoming rich and famous. As he regards himself a Chinese nationalist, he wanted to make clear to the world that he and his art are Chinese while making known to China that he is rich. Seriously studying all the new knowledge on international art and theory that became available to him at the academy, Wang also took up opportunities to promote him self, e.g. getting into television and participating in the famous China/Avant Gard Exhibition of 1989. During the 1980s, he created subtle paintings like the Northern Wasteland series and, a milestone in the history of contemporary Chinese art, his cool variations of Mao Zedong paintings of 1988 among which Mao Zedong AO is most important. After these works had brought him into conflict with the authorities, Wang reached an artistic and finally economic breakthrough as inventor and leader of the Political Pop-style when he combined Maoist propaganda motifs with international consumer brand names painted in a pop-art like manner - the Grand Criticism series. These works first gained international attention around the early 1990s through the sheer misunderstanding to take them as subversive anti-communist underground art and later in China itself where they were equally mistaken as aggressively anti-neo-colonial. As so often, part of both is true. Today Wang is somewhat trapped in the contradiction that the wealth so important to him ultimately comes from foreign money as there is still no big enough domestic market for contemporary art.


Yang Fudong


"Filmed over a five years’ period from 1997 to 2002 Yang Fudong’s first black and white movie tells the story of Zhuzi, a young intellectual, who is consulting one doctor after another out of a diffuse feeling of sickness. As no physical illness can be diagnosed, one may only guess that the true origin of his discomfort may be found in a profound discontent with his life.
A central theme of Yang Fudong’s work is the human condition of the urban intellectual. His protagonists mostly belong to the artist’s own generation of people between 20 and 40. This generation is old enough to remember life before the outset of opening and reform in the late 1970’s but spent most of its formative years under the new society. For many the changed situation created a lasting feeling of being strangely un-housed in their own lives. The unclear symptoms of Zhuzi may be due to such a disrupted inner balance that constantly has to react to fast altering external circumstances and thereby causes a diffuse sense of restless dissatisfaction that finally results in an intense but silent psychological drama.
Stylistically Yang’s videos often, though not exclusively, draw upon the visual language of 1920’s movies. This adds a certain local flavour to his work as in China a “typical twenties-style” most prominently existed in the cosmopolitan port-city of Shanghai with its political dominance of western colonial powers. Even though Estranged Paradise has a narrative structure it is not a film in strict terms. There is a lot of interaction among the characters but most of the auditory elements comprise of music and a narrator’s voice and not of direct conversation among its protagonists. Like Yang’s other works, Estranged Paradise is filmed very slowly and airs a melancholic atmosphere that leaves the viewer in a mood like a soft awakening from a mildly irritating daydream.
As a follow-up to Estranged Paradise, Yang has planned a five video long-term project featuring a group of intellectuals. The first film Seven Intellectuals in the Bamboo Forrest appeared in 2003, gaining wide international attention. In referring to the semi-historical circle of the 3rd century literati known as the Seven sages of the bamboo grove, Yang points back into Chinese history, which is an age old means of subtle self-expression of educated Chinese."

Xu Zhen

Xu turns these two prominent elements of public life into the private object of a washing machine, then drags them out of their obvious oblivion into the white cube, which is an act of addressing the politically not so opportune as well as connecting with global practices of choosing and presenting art. As one of the organizers of the nearly legendary 1999 Art for Sale show, a short lived attempt to create an appropriate way of dealing with art in Shanghai by exhibiting in a department store, and as co-founder of Bizart centre, Xu Zhen became a leading figure in Shanghai’s progressive art circles. His photography, video and installation work very often comes as performative and mostly is conceptual, with the body - the individual as well as the social one - as a main subject. Xu tackles political content that the Chinese government would prefer to be left unmentioned, such as violence, death and sexuality while remaining below the level of official attention. Rainbow, one of his most well known videos, documents the successive reddening of a human back through beating without actually showing the single hits. By the selective depiction of sheer violence, the work discusses the position of the individual body within Chinese society, but can also be read as a metaphor for the whole Chinese people as a body and as how this body is treated by those who hold the power to do so. The uncomfortable little bus has a thousand-fold daily interaction of its own with the private and - consequently - the public body."

Zhang Huan


"A naked man sitting in front of a wall, his forehead bold, long hair in the neck, skin of warm brown-bronze complexion. Eyes closed, mouth half open, the face appears peacefully concentrated. Though, something is irritating the viewer’s gaze: small black dots scattered all around the body, at a second glance identified as insects.

The nude is Zhang Huan spending a few hours sitting motionless in a public loo in Dashan Village and the print is a documentary of one of the best-known performances of the 1990’s in Beijing. After the first wave of post-Mao avant-garde art had come to an abrupt end in 1989, most progressive artists had to put themselves out of public sight to avoid pressure. Many artists moved to a village in the eastern outskirts of Beijing, known as East Village. Excluded from public exhibition spaces, new forms of private artistic activities emerged as well as changes in the subject matter of the art works. It was no longer the big idea - humanism, political ideology or social critique - like in the 1980’s. Now the focus lied on the daily experience of the “average man”. At a time, when China’s socio-economic restructuring gained full momentum, many Chinese still had to use the most impossible of public toilettes.

The statuesque appearance and the colour of Zhang Huan’s body reminds the viewer of a bronze sculpture, at least in the photographic documentation, which, after the performance was over, became “the work itself”. By choosing an act of physical endurance as his artistic medium, Zhang not only created a formally strict and multi-layered artwork, he also managed to comment on public issues at a time when this was less wanted. Now, living in New York, Zhang Huan experiences fewer limits than before, but still uses his body as a medium."

Ciu Xiuwen

Trained as a painter, she has been focusing on themes of sexuality and gender early on, once shocking her audience with paintings of naked men whose genitals she particularly emphasized; something even more uncommon in China than in the West. At the occasion of a dance night out in a posh Beijing club, she realized that there is another side to the beautiful glamour girls on the dance floor. “Like hell in heaven, or heaven in hell.” as she puts it. Nevertheless, she felt that oil painting, her main artistic medium so far, would not be sufficient to express what she wanted to communicate. Shortly afterwards Cui came into contact with shooting video and had found her technique. Hiding a camera in the ladies’ room of an expensive Beijing night-club, she simply filmed the women in front of the mirror. They rearrange or change clothing, check out their appearance, admire themselves, re-do makeup and exchange gossip. It is only towards the end of the video that it becomes apparent that what seems to be ordinary girls enjoying an evening out in fact are prostitutes having a break from work. They also tuck away their money in bras and briefs, call their customers to arrange for new dates and catch their breath before returning to the clubroom.

Cui does not comment on the scenes but offers a rare insight on one particular facet of the much-acclaimed China boom. Like Zhang Dali’s head down suspended plaster casts of migrant workers in Chinese Offspring the women in the lavatory do the lowest of services to those who profit most of the streams of money in contemporary China. And by doing so, add to the glamor of the scene. Watch art here.