ABOUT PEKING ART ASSOCIATES

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Nurturing Cultural Vitality and Distinctiveness in Urban Development Conversation Structure:   Why and how culture and heritage help urban development to support the economy, social cohesion and the environment. Successful developments undertaken by Swire Properties in China and how they present and engage with UK institutions and creatives How Chinese government at central and district […]

CGTN Culture Express Featuring Marc Quinn’s Solo Exhibition at CAFAM, Beijing, March-May 2019   Please click to watch this programme.        

But how do you know what to invest in? The last word goes to Pettit. “Buy something that makes your heart beat faster,” she advises. Read the interview: “There’s More Chinese Culture Than Willow-Patterned Plates”

She described her first encounter with Beijing as one of those life changing moments. It happened quite quickly and it has been many years of hard work but it has paid off – from gradually meeting Chinese artists, to total fascination with the diversity of Chinese contemporary art scene, even though an institutionalised art scene did not really exist when Emily began her career. The Arts are intertwined in many ways in Emily’s life; her rich knowledge of music, philosophy and literature has equipped her with a comprehensive and exacting eye for visual arts. Led by her business acumen, she made the visionary decision to move to Shanghai in 2006 and set up an independent contemporary Chinese art consultancy, when she had just turned 27. She then moved to Beijing several years later and we are sitting in the flat in a diplomatic compound she has leased ever since. “This flat has very high ceilings for central Beijing. With no other tall buildings nearby to block the view, I really enjoy the cityscape, the embassy district and the park beyond. When I first took it on, the flat was not distinctive and it had no spirit or warmth. I could not alter the layout, but I did covert the old laundry room into a reading room. I often work, read and write there, immersing myself into isolated serenity.”

On the occasion of the Hurun Report Art Foundation’s inaugural exhibition in London, Christie’s filmed Emily de Wolfe Pettit speaking about the exhibition

“Circles Lines” at London’s China Exchange is the Hurun Art Foundation’s first exhibition in Europe. Coinciding with Chinese New Year, the celebration of Chinese contemporary art features the work of fifteen artists including Wang Tiande, Qiu Jie, and Shen Fan, to name a few.” – Nicholas Forrest, Artinfo

Traditional and contemporary art, curated by Emily de Wolfe Pettit, founder of Beijing-based Arts Influential China consultancy, showcases a range of local artists.

Emily de Wolfe Pettit and her colleague Li Yi Hui were delighted to accompany Ian Charles Stewart of the ground-breaking foundation Wheels Plus Wings on a journey into Hebei province to visit Wang Meng Xing last month, a budding artist with a remarkable personal story of art’s creative power over physical adversity.

Our visit was recorded by China Daily.

The Fine Art Society Contemporary is presenting the work of two bright young stars of the Beijing art world, Chi Ming and J S Tan. Following on from their joint exhibition with Atkins & Ai Gallery, Beijing, last year, Testing Freedom’s Temperature will mark the London debut for both artists.

Visually the artists differ, but explore the same pervading themes of their young post-Mao generation and raise questions about the implications of China’s economic and cultural change. For two decades Chinese youth have lived, unlike their elders, without the ‘religion of Mao’. Theirs is a new culture with bigger boundaries and rampant materialism.

“The works of J S Tan and Chi Ming, in radically different ways, harbour the stirrings of a complex adaptive reaction to the de-centering of our modern institutions. The honesty of their felt experience and their ability to explore dialectics in their art are a testimony of their talent as artists and as bold forerunners of a generation in transition.” – Michelle Ho

Leading up to the 2008 Olympics, Beijing went on a hotel building frenzy. Unlike in other Olympic cities, however, long after the medal winners moved on the tourists kept coming.

The newest hotels to hit China’s capital are seen as ambassadors of the new Beijing.

A graphic rendering of Rosewood (left), due to open later this year.

Slated for an autumn opening opposite the CCTV Tower, Rosewood Beijing will be the Texas-based group’s first foray into China.

The 284 apartment-styled guest rooms and suites average a spacious 50 square meters.

Facilities will include seven food outlets, indoor pool, gym and yoga studio. An on-site spa will feature six private treatment rooms, while spa addicts can opt to stay in one of the five spa suites.

The Beijing hotel will feature artworks sourced by curators Arts Influential China.

– By Tina Hsiao & Jules Kay for CNN

Mandarin-speaking, Oxford-educated, Australian-born de Wolfe Pettit, is an art advisor, curator and dealer, all neatly rolled into one. This means she can help you whether you’re a newbie collector looking for the hottest, up-and-coming name, or a serious player with a mind-blowing budget who wants to visit painter Zhang Xiaogang at work in his studio before pocketing half a dozen pieces to take home. She’s got her beady eye permanently on the market (much like Charles Saatchi, who is all aflutter over the Chinese scene), keeping track of auction records and sales, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of which artists are exhibiting where and which emerging ones you need to know. If you would like to visit a private Chinese museum or pop into a heavyweight collector’s home, she will whip out her iPhone and have it sorted in a jiffy.

‘Chi Ming – JS Tan: Testing Freedom’s Temperature’ displays the works by Chi Ming (Yan Tai, 1984) and JS Tan (Hong Kong, 1986). Both artists, associated with their country’s leading art professors and two of the world’s finest art colleges, CAFA in Beijing and Rhode Island School of Design in USA, explore processes of freedom and liberty through their artistic expression, the power of choice and self-determination. Placing their works side-by-side, it is interesting to witness the sensual quality of Tan’s ink and charcoal works, full of discipline and unambiguity, together with the hot-headed Chi Ming’s oil paintings, captive of his desires and intimate scenarios.
– Diana Coco

Today Art Museum is housed in an ex-brewery by the railway tracks in south-east Beijing. There’s something about the location that makes it feel cutting-edge.

The museum was inaugurated in 2006 with an exhibition of Fang Lijun’s work. It houses a permanent exhibition, albeit of on-loan items, and holds temporary exhibitions. There is an excellent bookstore, restaurant and souvenir shop, the whole redolent of Tate Modern. There’s also an art club and workshop facilities.

Art Today Museum was the brainchild of property developer Zhang Baoquan. As such, it is set in the Pingod Community of new apartment buildings, but wherein International Art Plaza is being developed.

Worthy of particular mention is Emily de Wolfe Pettit’s gallery, which works with both established and up-and-coming artists. There have been fascinating solo exhibitions of the work of Jiang Shan Chun and J S Tan. “Fantasia in Ink Major” featured the work of the young ink artists Qu Weiwei and Li Yongfei.
– Mark Azavedo

If you are in Beijing’s CBD or nearby – Emily Pettit’s Peking Art Associates is a must-go for looking at art. The gallery has an intimate feel and atmosphere. Emily has a long experience, a great eye for art and talent and this is for sure a great place to visit if you want to invest in art from China.

She is privileged to announce the inaugural solo exhibition of artist J. S. Tan. Hong Kong-born Tan hails from the prestigious RISD, Rhode Island School of Design (B.F.A) and Brown University (B.A.), Providence, USA and his works are contained in notable public collections.

– Thomas Lykke, Creative Director, OEO

“The background to the 17th century movement of Vanitas and its particular flourishing in Holland was a society that had just undergone huge upheaval through the North European Reformation, ousted the Catholic overlords and embraced Protestantism housed in severe, unadorned churches, witnessing a dramatic decline and indeed prohibition of some forms of religious art. The usual sources of patronage –the Church and aristocracy – were superseded by an increasingly prosperous middle class, whose insatiability for acquiring and displaying art (even a local eatery would be adorned with delicately rendered works) led to the burgeoning of a range of genres, most notably large-scale landscapes and emblematic still lifes, such as vanitas that befitted the pious and hardworking Protestant aesthetic. Though their outlook mellowed as their security increased and their wealth grew, these Dutch burghers of the seventeenth century never accepted the full Baroque style which held sway in the south and throughout Catholic Europe.. Where the 17th century Dutch school saw new artistic genres develop in a premeditated move away from dogmatic and ideologically-centred art work, in China too there is arguably a deliberate departure now from the work characterised by references to political ideology of recent Chinese art history… While social and political ideology and dogma have largely been the mainstay of male artists, it is female artists living and working in China today who have been most responsive in exploring the individual’s personal plight in the ever changing context of modern-day China, often through a return to the quotidian. – Emily de Wolfe Pettit

While social and political ideology and dogma have largely been the mainstay of male artists, it is female artists living and working in China today who have been most responsive in exploring the individual’s personal plight in the ever changing context of modern-day China, often through a return to the quotidien. In the work of artists such as Yang Jing and her female friends and peers, elements of Vanitas in various forms gather pace: in the series ‘A Piece of Life’, Liang Yuanwei emphasizes processes rather than outcomes, with emphasis on the rendering of textures, colours and particularly forms, to the point that the search for solidity is deliberately undermined through her sobering repetition of domestic, old-world patterns – or to a different mind’s eyes, a re examination of beauty through morbidity and the finite; Song Kun’s protagonist ‘Xi Jia’, whose personal journey addressing a kaleidoscope of human emotional experience, shows her through the delicate agency of graphite drawing on diaphanous surfaces and an array of fragile media, such as broken glass, cotton or antique baubles; and elsewhere, Yang Liu has dedicated herself to a body of work over the past two years in which the defining cornerstone is the motif of decaying books from which trees soar with the triumphant view of natural phenomenon over man-made artifice – and in which vanity lies not in the insatiable desire for earthly possessions, but in the possibility of attaining Reason. – Emily de Wolfe Pettit

Vanitas art of 17th century Holland, associated with the transcience of human existence, obsession with beauty, material possession and mortality are subjects found with increasing regularity in the work of artists, and particularly female artists in China. Beijing-born artist Yang Jing’s paintings simultaneously draw from the cyberpunk trend of anime and film and a more contemplative return to essential questions of the individual’s existence. Perhaps this work echoes the concerns of the young, predominantly only children and nuclear families; a burgeoning middle-class that is the future and audience for contemporary art in China. Yang Jing’s exhibition opened in Shanghai on 29 May 2009 at Andrew James Art, curated by Australian Emily de Wolfe Pettit, director of an independent, China-based arts consultancy. emily@artsinfluentialchina.com
– Reg Newitt

Charles Saatchi has bought cleverly in the past, but is he crackers paying so much for Chinese contemporary art, asks Godfrey Barker. Now he is just one individual amid a second, 21st-century wave of buyers from China, Hong kong, Taiwan and Indonesia. They drive the market and their taste will determine future values, not that of buyers from the West. Put bluntly, is Saatchi’s taste Asian enough for safety? “Yes and no,” is the careful reply of Emily de Wolfe Pettit, the Peking and Shanghai-based dealer who advises Western and Chinese buyers. “He buys art that the Chinese like, art which explores the cross influence of East and West. But he also has a large grouping of works with political messages, easily identifiable as Chinese to the Western eye. It’s an open question whether this highly political painting, much of it thick with Chairman Mao iconography, has long- term appeal in China…” “Taste in the 21st century will be shaped by the reputable China-based dealers, not by those in London – by professors such as Xu Bing and wealthy Chinese collectors, not just from Peking but from Shanxi and beyond,” she says. “They are less engaged by politics than by a reworking of classic traditions – for example, the painting of ink-brush works…” – Godfrey Barker