Helen Deng
deng.hneng@gmail.com
PEOPLE in China are increasingly buying their daily necessities and household appliances online, and this means that they are now open to the idea of making online art purchases.
An online art shop headquartered in Shenzhen, www.318yishu.com, was launched by 318 Art and Culture Investment Company on Monday, the same day the company opened an exhibition of works by young artists from major art academies around China.
The exhibition at Guan Shanyue Art Museum is a rare cooperation between an art shop and a State-level art museum.
More than 80 works are on display, which the academic board selected from nine major art schools on the Chinese mainland.
Ye Xiangming, curator of the exhibition and head of Lingnan Art Museum, who is one of the board members, divides the works into three groups: Reflection, Scenery, and Phantom. Reflection shows the young artists’ reflections on society. Scenery shows how they perceive nature and Phantom conveys the young artists’ visions and dreams.
Yang Xiaoyan, art director of the exhibition and deputy head of the School of Communication and Design at Sun Yat-sen University, said these works, although lacking in maturity, would help people get a glimpse into the future.
“Looking at the works, I feel that the romantic world that existed when I was young has gone, and what now dominates the young people’s world is a hippie attitude, loneliness, and an emphasis on the process rather than the result,” he said.
He added that the artistic contributions featured in the exhibition “may create a great cultural movement in the near future.”
The styles of artistic expression change, and so are the ways of presentation and trading, and that is why Liu Zhenwen, general manager of www.318yishu.com, established the B2C website for arts.
“We are trying to be www.360buy.com in the art world,” he said, referring to one of the largest online shopping malls in China.
Liu said they have representatives in all the nine art schools that participated in the exhibition, and that these representatives are charged with selecting artworks from students, which are then uploaded onto the website.
This is followed by a normal e-business procedure: Buyers view the artworks online, pay via alipay or bank transfer, and receive their purchases by express delivery. One difference with ordinary e-business, according to Liu, is that the delivery of artworks requires costly insurance coverage.
Wu Jiajun, a graduate of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts who has three paintings on display at Guan Shanyue Art Museum, visited the exhibition Monday. He said he thought it was a great platform for young artists to communicate and enter the market.
It is difficult for young artists like Wu to earn a living and, like many of his schoolmates, he has been tutoring younger artists to support himself while pursuing his dreams. But now, as a signed artist of www.318yishu.com, he can earn some money and also gain access to a wider market.
Ye added that “e-business is rapidly replacing traditional trading in China. So online trading is a method that the art world has to face.”
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