Page 54 - Art Review

Introduction

Those of you who are familiar with ArtReview’s annual Future Greats issue
might be tempted to think that what’s to come is simply a list of artists
in whom you should invest your time and/or your money, selected by people
who will ensure that it’s worth your while to invest your time and/or your
money in them. After all, that’s the way this art business generally works,
right? Wrong. Or you’d be wrong when it comes to the Future Greats
business, at least.
As much as the exercise of asking a series of artists, curators and writers
to select an artist who they think is producing interesting work does provide
a list that might be used in the manner discussed, it also serves to document
new ways of looking and thinking about art. So among this year’s featured
artists you’ll find not a person, but a mode of expression: the placards created
by protesters at various rallies last year (which, of course, in their directness
may be more personal than almost any other work in this issue). On the
subject of the personal, you’ll also find, among the artists that follow,
someone who refuses to sell his found-object sculptures, a group that
doesn’t make objects but curates workshops that take place under a flyover
and an artist selected on the basis of an intense encounter with a single
work. This year marks the second of ArtReview’s ongoing partnership with
K11 Art Foundation, an organisation that nurtures artistic talent within
the Greater China region, promotes it to the world in general and exposes
new audiences to art via its galleries throughout the region and, more
particularly, its ‘art mall’ concept. The latter allows for exhibitions to take
place in a retail environment. Not in the sense of the exhibition taking place
in a commercial gallery; rather in the sense of the exhibition being staged
within an environment other than the conventional white cube or museum.
An environment that people who don’t visit museums on a regular basis
find more comfortable to inhabit. And perhaps one of the common threads
in this year’s selection of artists is that art becomes more interesting when
it maintains a close connection to life.

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