Newman Huo
ART entrepreneur Elsa Wen, who owns the private When Gallery in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, plans to promote Guangdong contemporary art at home and abroad.
In cooperation with Art de Vivre in the Shenzhen Sculpture Academy (SZSA), Wen, 30, is staging a special exhibition in her gallery in the SZSA through June 18.
Tilted “Maeght: Art Without Boundaries,” the exhibition includes more than 30 works by internationally acclaimed artists, such as Joan Miro of Spain, Alberto Giacometti of Switzerland, Marco Del Re of Italy, Aki Kuroda of Japan, Xavier Grau of Spain, Selma Gurbuz of Turkey, Luc Doerflinger of France, and Walasse Ting of China. All works are on loan from the Maeght Gallery, a well-known private gallery in France.
At the conclusion of the exhibition, Wen plans to hold another exhibition for the Beijing-based female avant-garde photographer, Chen Man, who is represented by Wen’s gallery, in the SZSA at the end of June.
“My ultimate goal is to run a professional private gallery and specialize in promoting contemporary art in oil painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video, in South China, and particularly in Guangdong Province,” Wen said in an interview Sunday.
Wen said she was going to stage a series of exhibitions with various themes for some young, promising Guangdong-based avant-garde artists in her gallery in Shenzhen next year.
“There are few professional galleries in South China nowadays and I’d like to blaze a trail in the art market in South China and make more people aware of contemporary Guangdong art by running a number of high quality art exhibitions,” she said.
Based on her perception of her own clients, Wen believes two kinds of private art collectors are emerging in Guandong Province today.
“One is the entrepreneurs who are rich, well educated, have more spiritual pursuits and believe that art collection can bring them more fortune,” Wen said.
“And the other kind is the young people who are not very rich, but are not confined to traditional thinking and don’t spend their savings merely on apartments or private cars,” she said.
“Only through running high quality art exhibitions will I be able to bring together the best Guangdong artists and art collectors from home and abroad and provide a platform for them to interact with each other,” she said.