Expat Artists Choose China
Life-size ice sculptures of children left to melt in a Beijing park were shown on television all over the world. Meant to dramatize global warming and commissioned by Greenpeace, the sculptures were the work of Joseph Ellis, an expat in China who left New York five years ago. He attended China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, becoming the only Westerner to graduate from the prestigious school. In addition to the Greenpeace commission, he sells his work to major corporations and to Chinese collectors. He now works in Jingdezhen in the south of the country, where his studio of over 10,000 square feet rents for about $245 per month.
Cheap digs are usually what draws artists to certain neighborhoods, cities and countries. However, China also offers art materials at prices far lower than those in the U.S. or Europe. This offers artists the opportunity to experiment with media that would be prohibitively expensive anywhere else.
But that’s not all. As an article in The New York Times, January 10, notes, China is edgy, dynamic."The whole country’s on the hustle. It’s like New York in the ‘70s. I fit in here,” says Brooklyn-born artist Alfredo Martinez.
Recently bulldozers were dispatched to demolish illegally build structures, some of them artist studios, outside of Beijing. Some studios were destroyed, but then the bulldozers stopped, leaving many of them intact. Even this did not send the artists home though some moved to other communities in China.
For more, see www.nytimes.com/design. The article is titled “For Expatriates in China, Creative Lives of Plenty.” For general information on expat life in China, see Moon Living Abroad in China, Including Hong Kong and Macau (Paperback) by Barbara Strother and Stuart Strother.