At this past February’s Armory Show in New York City, Steve Hanson and
Giovanni Intra manned an active booth. As directors of China Art Objects
Gallery in Los Angeles they provided plenty of their artists’ works for the
shopping throngs. They offered piles of Jonathan Pylypchuk collages and
little David Korty watercolours. They displayed an endlessly looping
Jonathan Horowitz video (The Soul of Tammi Terrell, 2001) and a couple of
replicated broken walls made by Eric Wesley (Ass Holes, 2001). Bolstered by
two favourable sentences from the New York Times, JP Munro’s oil portrait of
an ominously decaying Napoleonic figure, Permanent Death (2002), created a
little rupture along the pathway which stretched the length of the pier. The
guys from China Art Objects seemed to be complete professionals.
For Hanson and Intra, not to mention the Los Angeles’ gallery scene in
general, all of this is in stark contrast to 1997. Then, Hanson was playing
guitar in the band Mithter, while Intra was a young critic finishing his
master’s degree at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. With
partners Peter Kim and Amy Yao (both of whom have left the gallery in the
intervening years), the pair decided to open a project space. In search of
cheap rents, they stumbled upon Chung King Road, a pedestrian market place
dotted with Chinese antique shops, gift stores, and one small market.
Noticing that one-third of the store-fronts were unoccupied, the would-be
gallerists began talking to some of the local proprietors and found support
for their idea. Shortly thereafter, they opened China Art Objects in a space
at the southwest end of the road, choosing to keep the name already posted
on the sign above the front window. The gallery focused on young artists,
many of whom were from Los Angeles, and the shows quickly began to draw
attention.
Today, China Art Objects is somewhat analogous to an anchor in a shopping
mall, one of those big-name department stores that holds down one end of the
establishment and keeps traffic flowing. Chung King Road is now lined with
galleries, studio spaces and retail boutiques, mixed in with the
old-fashioned shops and little jewellery stores operated by the
Chinese-Americans who had been the sole occupants of this neighbourhood
since the 1950s. Some members of this older community still live in the
second storey residences above the store-fronts. The original and new
tenants together form a schizophrenic culture, one in which several
languages are spoken and multiple generations interact on a daily basis. Old
couples work behind their shop-counters as children run giddily up and down
Chung King Road, bouncing into hip grad-students or gaggles of collectors
who have just swung by from downtown’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a short
drive away.
I recently found artists Jonathan Pylypchuk and Kim Fisher chit-chatting in
a smoky office above China Art Objects’ main exhibition space. Both show
with the gallery, and both make work that reflects the formal transmutations
endemic to LA art.
Pylypchuk, who recently received his master’s degree from UCLA, creates
tender scenes of pitiful ennui, using scraps of fabric, bits of wood and a
toothpick here and there, all arranged on painted surfaces that are both
glittery and messy. The forms are compiled into crude, puppet-like
characters who live out simple relationships.
Their interplay of dialogue, drawn with scrappy handwriting on the surface
of what could only loosely be called a painting, amounts to a surprisingly
clever articulation of a young American’s bourgeois pathos. Fisher, who
completed her graduate study at Otis College, has, in consecutive China Art
Objects solo shows, displayed big, bold paintings which fold the notion of a
monochrome in on itself. With a nearly maniacal precision, Fisher controls
her perfectly flat surface, often leaving portions of linen exposed,
creating the sense that the paint is clothing the canvas. Finally, she adds
an element of fashion-obsession to the conflux by embedding a couture logo
in the colour-field or silkscreening a diamond watch directly onto the
painting.
I asked Pylypchuk and Fisher what they enjoy about showing work in
Chinatown.
While Pylypchuk only refers to the convenient market across the way, Fisher
is feeling slightly more loquacious. ‘Everyone here is enthusiastic,’ she
responds thoughtfully, ‘and that’s what the art world needs: more
enthusiasm’. In this spirit, Black Dragon Society, Diannepruess, Goldman
Tevis, Inmo Gallery and Lord Mori Gallery are among those who have similarly
set up shop on Chung King Road. In the beginning, Chinatown openings could
be characterised as a small group of artists, like Pylypchuk and Fisher,
drinking beer out of a keg in both revelry and commiseration. Today, these
conjunctive events are street scenes, peopled by occasional celebrities and
other types from nearby Hollywood, regular Angelenos who are simply looking
for something to do on a weekend, and LA’s top collectors, gallerists and
artists. Above all of these eager co-minglers, festive little coloured
lanterns light the pathway between bustling rooms full of art and commerce.
‘We put up the lights and changed the lanterns,’ Mary Goldman, co-director
of Goldman Tevis tells me while resting upon a white, rounded band-stand
made by Jessica Bronson. At the recent opening of a group show here, the
Dick Slessig Trio played music for hours atop this sculptural form.
Explaining the paper lanterns, Goldman recalls: ‘There were lights here but
they were broken and all of the lanterns had fallen down. I had a
scissor-lift for an installation one day. I just came out and all of the
shop-owners got together and gave me lanterns and bulbs, then all of the
other galleries came out to help. It was sort of a spontaneous, joint
improvement of the street.’
Goldman and partner John Tevis opened their gallery in 2000, directly across
the pathway from China Art Objects. Previously, Goldman was working as a
private curator in New York while Tevis was doing investment banking at
Deutsche Bank and running a project space out of his home in Long Island
City. The pair, who had gone to college together, decided to open a gallery
and, within two months, had moved to Los Angeles.
‘The rents started out being really ridiculously low,’ admits Goldman.
‘Ultimately it financially made it possible for more experimentation. You
could do shows that weren’t all about selling.’ Goldman Tevis opened with LA
artist Andrea Bowers; they showed a video work and intricate pencil drawings
which calibrated the prismatic refractions of pop-culture celebrity, a
category which is of continued interest to young artists, and which has
particular resonance within Los Angeles. Perhaps this investigation was
prescient of things to come, as the Chinatown scene has become the subject
of more feature articles than one would expect a bunch of quasi-experimental
galleries to attract. Discussions of the hot-spot have unfolded on the pages
of several high-end, mainstream magazines, as well as in the local press.
The attention from the media has only increased Chung King Road’s
prominence, lending a nearly instant reputability to galleries that are
still practically fledglings, and fostering the influx of new tenants to the
area.
‘I’m surprised at how quickly it’s grown,’ admits Goldman, referring
simultaneously to the relative prosperity of Chung King Road itself and the
buzz it has generated. ‘I didn’t expect how popular it became to happen as
quickly as it did. The press have been very generous.’ Regardless of
celebrity, the gallery’s viability has allowed some compelling new work to
be shown in Los Angeles, from the fractured narratives and collaged
realities of New York photographer Miranda Lichtenstein, to the delicately
laced and totally unwearable under-garments made by LA artist Josh
Blackwell.
As in any case of a predominantly middle-class Caucasian sector claiming an
under-developed inner-city neighbourhood, there are cultural difficulties
which linger somewhere between gentrification and colonisation. Some suggest
that the new gallerists are actively participating with the already
established business community, rather than in spite of it. Mary Goldman
insists that Chinatown remains 90% Chinese-American and that business
leaders have welcomed the redirection of visitors to this long-neglected
area. Gim Fong, the seventy-one year old owner and proprietor of Fong’s
Oriental Works of Art, which is a couple of doors down from China Art
Objects, agrees. When asked if business has improved recently because of the
prominence of his newer neighbours, he says, ‘It picked up a little bit
because people have finally noticed Chinatown. It brings a lot of people who
have never seen us before. Now we have a different group of people here, we
have a mixed group, not all Chinese.’
Fong, a master artisan known for his delicate miniatures, points to a
yellowing picture of himself in uniform secured high above his cash register
and recalls his first days on Chung King Road. ‘I was drafted in 1952,’ he
remembers, ‘that’s the year we started the store.’ Then, it was he and his
brothers and sisters who ran the business, members of LA’s first generation
of Chinese-American kids to grow up in old China City, and later, what is
now Chinatown. Chung King Road was then a satellite of the main market
place, a larger pedestrian shopping centre on the other side of Hill Avenue,
which today is in a similar state of disrepair, partial occupancy and some
renewed interest. Fong describes the 1950s as the hey-day of the area, with
shoppers bustling about and a thriving culture dominated by
Chinese-Americans and recent immigrants. As was the case all over America,
the race riots of the 1960s left urban centres isolated and neglected, as
residents and visitors alike were drawn to the relative safety of the
suburbs. Like other cities that underwent this transformation, Los Angeles
was left with a desolate downtown and Chung King Road never fully recovered.
Fong admits that the area is experiencing a recovery, though he is uncertain
about the future of the Chinese-owned businesses, many of which have been
there as long as he has. ‘The first generation, they’re all gone. There are
only a few original owners that are still here, most of them will die out
and that’s it.’ Though these are most often family businesses, Fong says
they will not likely be passed down to another generation. Fong admits, as
he stands among his immense treasure of little jade frogs, gold monkeys,
tiny decorated pavilions and wooden boxes, ‘when I leave this is going to be
closed. My kids aren’t going to work for peanuts. I sent them to school so
they won’t do this. That’s progress.’ I asked Fong how the older generation
feels about the art scene that dominates the street’s life with noisy
evening openings and daytime gallery hopping. ‘Some of the older generation
are not that happy about it,’ he concedes hesitantly. ‘They can’t speak
their language, they don’t have the customs, and they get kind of freaked
out when they see those guys with all of this make-up on. It’s culture
shock. But the younger generation understands. And that’s what’s coming in
here, the younger generation.’
‘They want to do this Artforum ad,’ says Diannepreuss gallery director Joel
Mesler as he drags on a cigarette and shows me a typed page that is to be
submitted to the magazine. ‘They want just the galleries in it but we
included all of the other stores on the road.’ I talk to Mesler in an office
behind an exhibition space containing several simple tree-house-like
structures made by Austin Thomas, works that Mesler describes as ‘social
sculpture’. As we talk, the artist herself is ‘using’ the work, reading a
book while perched upon a high platform. Founded in 2000 with the backing of
a European patron, Diannepreuss consistently shows work that is energetic
and unexpected. Mesler, who soon plans to transform the gallery into an
experimental store, believes there isn’t necessarily a standard mode of
operation among this diverse group of exhibition spaces. ‘I think everyone
is doing their own thing and everyone is at different levels. I would
definitely say that the galleries are all taking previous models of what a
gallery is, so in that sense, it would be product oriented,’ he says,
commenting on the designation of ‘alternative’ that has been attributed to
the Chinatown scene.
Indeed, the art galleries here have spawned an array of other kinds of
spaces dealing with products in a number of ways. German clothing designers
Loy and Ford set up their boutique of edgy downtown fashions a few doors
down the road, and a new clothing store, Sling Ting, opened only recently
next to Fong’s. Mesler also helps run The Paisley Vortex, an ad-hoc
performance space located in the shopping centre on the other side of Hill
Avenue, while China Art Objects’ Steve Hanson is working with artist Jorge
Pardo on an eagerly anticipated bar in that same centre, scheduled to open
in May. Long-time residents like Gim Fong may be pleased to see such a
sustained interest in their old neighbourhood, but there remains a subtle
sense of trepidation when it comes to the rapid thrust of progress. ‘I hope
they’ll develop some other Chinese businesses that will help bring this area
back up,’ admits Fong. ‘And I’d like to see more Chinese artists, they’re
the ones who really need help.’
www.chinatownla.com,
www.chinaartobjects.com,
www.inmogallery.com,
www.lordmorigallery.com
Malik Gaines is a senior editor at Artext. He lives in LA, where he performs with his band, My Barbarian. This feature was researched in collaboration with Wen Wen Hsu