To young people with dreams of becoming artists.

As a gallery operator, I see many young people wholeheartedly throwing themselves into art. This passion is commendable, but there is also a lot of blind optimism and the naïve belief that artistic creation is a relaxed and romantic affair. Some people approach it with a playboy attitude. I think that perhaps there is a need to ‘strike the mountain to shake the tiger’, to give some honest advice and sound a warning from the gallery’s perspective.

These times have given people an illusion, that art is an enviable, star-studded profession: fancy cars, beautiful women, raucous parties, elite status, staking out the front lines of fashion. But this is all an illusion. Artists take a risky gamble by subjecting themselves to bitter struggles for the first half of their lives. The majority of famous artists spent their youths honing their artistic skills under Dickensian conditions, only reaching a turning point in middle age. Qi Baishi, who only fully matured in his later years, spent the first fifty years of his life languishing in his hometown. When De Kooning immigrated to America, he made his living as a house painter, carpenter and mural painter, and didn’t get his first opportunity to take part in a gallery exhibition until the age of thirty eight. The life of the artist is also often accompanied by inordinate suffering: when Joseph Bueys was 22, his plane was shot down over the Soviet Union and he barely escaped with his life. Chinese performance artist Datong Dazhang still isn’t very well known today. He lived in a trash-covered makeshift hut and committed suicide in 2000 as his last work of performance art. For an artist to make a truly original creation requires persistent toil and effort. We live in an era of hedonist pursuits, and even intellectuals are faced with worldly temptations. In his book One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse writes, “when the working class yearns for the luxuries of the bourgeoisie, they no longer have the will to dig the grave of capitalism.” You can stand the luxuries of your contemporaries, but can you face profound ideas in the grips of suffering?

We see a lot of work by young artists, and we often discover the same weaknesses: shallow, clichéd themes, affected sentiments and imitative styles. I’d advise young artists to consider the following two points. First, contemporaneity and timelessness; think about how you’ll view your own art work in ten years time. When the fashionable images recede like the tides, will they expose weak and naïve thinking? The hearts of brilliant artists are full of a sense of history; their works powerfully grasp the passions of the moment while resisting the corrosive effects of time. Song dynasty painter Fan Kuan’s Traveling Amid Streams and Mountains still has the power to move us today. The second point is individuality and commonality; aside from expressing spiritual individuality, does your work bring any hope of salvation to the cultural matrix? Good artists use deep individual marks to express universal spiritual sentiments, touching on the pains of their era, just as Francis Bacon’s paintings touched directly on the disintegration of faith after World War II and a Europe disillusioned with civilization, and Xu Bing’s dissection and rearrangement of Chinese words implied doubts about cultural traditions.

Many young artists want to know the standards we use in selecting young artists to work with: extraordinary ideas built upon a foundation of a unique spiritual world, tenacity driven by an overpowering curiosity about the unknown realms of the soul. As a gallery we must be responsible to the collectors. If only a few years after an artwork is collected, the artist gives up on creating, the gallery loses the trust of its clients. For this reason, we will observe a young artist’s creative abilities and attitudes over time. Many artists collapse of their own accord before the observation period is complete.

Describing the powerful creative spirit that drives the artist, Wu Guanzhong drew an analogy with grass, which “continues to grow, even when you water it with boiling water.” If your passion for art refuses to be extinguished in the face of cruel reality, please continue your adventure. ‘Striking the mountain to shake the tiger’ will only scare off the opportunistic little monkeys and the jumpy mountain goats. The real tigers will roar in the end. My suggestion is to find a job that allows you to meet your needs and freely control your time, set a long-term creative plan and prepare for a lasting battle fraught with setbacks. We will passionately and wisely support you. Not only is the future in your hands; the honor and dignity of the gallery depends on you as well.

Jessica Zhang, Director,
Amelie Gallery
798 Art District, Beijing, 2010 (year of the tiger)