I fondly remember my one visit back in 1996 to the original Saatchi gallery on Boundary Road in London, mostly because at the time it was filled with Stephan Balkenhol's wonderful wood sculptures. I didn't make it to the South Bank venue in the short two years the gallery situated itself in County Hall there, but now Charles Saatchi has opened a show of contemporary Chinese art from his collection called The Revolution Continues in what is reportedly a beautiful new space in an old military barracks in Chelsea. Mark Brown shed some light on the collector's technique for putting this inaugural show together:
Bay Area denizens who visited the excellent Half-Life of a Dream exhibition recently at SFMOMA will recognize some of the names featured in the London show like Yue Minjun (pictured above), Zhang Huan and Fang Lijun. These are the artists from contemporary China who are making a big splash in the art world right now. Adrian Searle, however, is singularly unimpressed with what he sees in Saatchi's gallery:
Perhaps some genuine curation would not have been such a bad idea after all. Charlotte Higgins shares Searle's disappointment about the works on display, though she did get a kick out of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's Old Persons Home, hyper-realistic sculptures of elderly world leaders rolling about one room of the gallery in motorized wheelchairs:
Again, the work by many of these same artists that I saw in the SFMOMA exhibit was many things, but hectoring or one note? No. So I'm liable to turn my eye to the collector in this case, and it's certainly true that much of the work glimpsed in the Guardian online gallery does seem to have been selected for its shock value. But back to the gallery itself, the one thing no one seems to have any complaints about. Stephen Bayley lays out a little bit of the background:
Of course it sounds like there was no danger of this first batch of art being overwhelmed by the space in which it was being shown. As for me, I will remain wistful for the old Boundary Road gallery, but I also can't wait to investigate this new incarnation in all its converted Georgian glory. Just as long as Saatchi doesn't start charging admission.