Top 8 Art Radar search terms: contemporary art trends revealed

JAPAN KOREA ART GRAFFITI NETWORKING PROPAGANDA POSTERS ART TRENDS

What are Art Radar‘s most popular search terms? Japan tops other Asian countries with most-searched-for art, graffiti moves out from the underground and Chinese art and politics are brought once again to the fore.

Art Radar Asia has now published two lists of original data on our most searched contemporary Asian artists, one in December 2009 and the other in July 2010. With these lists, we attempted to offer some insight into which artists are currently enjoying popularity in the international and Asian art markets.

Chinese propaganda poster.

While doing this research we also noticed that a number of common search engine terms were leading people to our articles. Just as we did for our most searched artists, we have decided to publish a list of most searched terms used by readers, which could hint at current trends within the contemporary art community. This list covers searches undertaken between 30 June 2009 to 30 June 2010.

1. Contemporary art
3,164 searches

2. Japanese art
1,680 searches (including: Japanese art – 503 searches; modern Japanese art – 372 searches; Japanese contemporary art – 334 searches; Japanese artist – 471 searches)

3. Propaganda posters
863 searches (including: Propaganda posters – 546 searches; Chinese propaganda posters – 317 searches)

4. Contemporary art collectors
394 searches

5. Graffiti (Banksy)
374 searches

6.  Art networking sites
340 searches

7. Korean art
246 searches

8. Chinese propaganda
320 searches

Art Radar Asia receives over 27,000 page views in a month. Our readers come to us from numerous places across the Internet: search engines like Google, social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook, our weekly email newsletter and word of mouth. Our readers are art collectors, gallerists and dealers, art professionals, scholars and artists. For all these people, it is important to understand current trends in art, whether they are influenced by them or not.

We can’t claim that this list is a reliable proxy for the most-searched art terms on the Internet overall (take a look at our notes at the bottom of this article). However, we do think the list throws up some fascinating data. Below, we attempt to decipher some of the standout results from the tallies in this list.

Japanese art in top search spot

Takashi Murakami

Perhaps unsurprisingly, “Japanese art” sits in second place with an overall total of 1,680 searches. In both the December 2009 artist list and the June 2010 artist list, Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami held the number one spot as most searched artist on Art Radar. The desire to know more about this artist could be one of the factors driving this search result.

Propaganda posters and Chinese propaganda

With the work of contemporary Chinese artists continuing to sell for high prices and the artists themselves continuing to make headlines – as artists in China work under strong censorship laws they often create reactionary works – contemporary Chinese art has remained popular for some time. In addition, the current political situation in China drives external interest in the history of the country, ensuring propaganda posters created decades ago remain both relevant to contemporary study and highly collectable.

Art Radar Asia has published a number of stories on Chinese contemporary art and on propaganda art and Chinese propaganda posters.

Banksy, North London.

Art Radar graffiti series proves popular

In January this year, we published a two part series (Part I and Part II) explaining graffiti and street art. These articles have proven extremely popular, hinting at a desire to know more about this contradictory art form; it is one that is still often underground and sometimes even illegal (therefore inaccessible) and at the same time, with artists such as Banksy becoming known internationally, increasingly commercialised and collectible. We think this goes some way to explaining the 374 searches for “graffiti”.

Desire to connect to the international art community

We recorded 340 searches for “art networking sites”. Increasingly popular as a marketing and information tool, social networking sites tailored to art professionals can give members access to the knowledge of other art collectors and investors as well as the opportunity to view the work of artists from around the world. In March 2009, we linked to an excellent list of current social networking sites first published on Art Market Blog.

Notes

This list is not a reliable proxy for the most-searched art terms on the Internet overall. Here is why: If we have not written a story on or tagged this art term, the search engines will not bring us traffic for this search term and it won’t appear on our traffic analysis stats page. As we have only been up for just over two years it is quite possible that we have not yet covered some highly-searched art terms. And even if we have referenced an art term on our site and the art term is highly-searched, the searcher will not come to us unless we have a good page ranking for the story on the search engine.  For example if the story is, say, after page 4 of the search engine results, the searcher probably won’t find our story and will not appear in our stats. Despite these limitations the data is likely to be a reliable indicator for certain trends. Finally even if we have a story and the story is well-ranked, it may be that other stories on the same page are more alluring than ours and readers do not find their way to us.

KN/KCE

Related Topics: lists, from Art Radar, trends

Related Posts:

• Top 20 Asian artists June 2010: Art Radar Asia’s most-searched artists – July 2010 – evaluates the results with regards to artist activities
• What is street art? Top 5 street artists in the art world – Part II – March 2010 – an insightful overview of this controversial art form
• What is street art? Vandalism, graffiti or public art – Part I – January 2010 – an insightful overview of this controversial art form
• Top 17 Asian artists 2009: Art Radar Asia’s most-searched artists – December 2009 – includes some information on each artist
• Top 10 social networking sites for art – March 2009 – extremely useful, even readers’ comments left on this post point out some helpful sites

Subscribe to Art Radar Asia for more art-related lists and resources

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Visual culture of Shanghai on show at San Francisco Asian Art Museum

SHANGHAI ART SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM SHOW

For a long time in the West, the image of Asia has relied on popular, and almost always Western, media imagery. From medieval travel literature to films in today’s time, the tropes of the orient repeat itself with every kung fu movie. At “Shanghai“, at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the image of China comes from the subject itself.

Taking a cue from the 30th anniversary of the San Francisco-Shanghai sister-city relationship, “Shanghai” presents a portrait of a city evolving over 160 years. Accompanying the exhibition are year-long festivals, concerts, workshops, film screenings, talks and discussions. The exhibition features more than 130 artworks including China Trade oil paintings, Shanghai deco furniture and rugs, movie clips, revolutionary posters, and video and contemporary art installations.

Nanjing Road – From Series of Views of Shanghai, after 1937. By Zhao Weimin (dates unknown). Chromolithograph on paper. Collection of the Shanghai History Museum.

Mirroring the life pulse of Shanghai over a century and half are its art and art objects. Neatly divided into four time periods, “Beginnings” (1850–1911), “High Times” (1912–1949), “Revolution” (1920–1976), and “Shanghai Today” (1980–present), the exhibition presents a rare glimpse of Shanghai’s visual culture in transition from a modest Chinese port town to a bustling cosmopolitan city.

The success as well as the challenge of this exhibition lies in presenting a complex and multi-layered visual culture within the framework of a linear narrative. Beginning with China Trade paintings from the 1850s, painted in large numbers to document the world of European colonialists, the exhibition moves forward to highlight artists from the Shanghai School who broke away from the traditional mode of landscape painting and created expressive and dramatic works for wealthy Chinese patrons. The later arrival of print technology lead to mass production and there are a number of posters and other graphic art on display, including the infamous large-format colorful government propaganda posters.

Landscape-Commemorating Huang Binhong-Scroll, 2007. By Shen Fan (b. 1952). Installation with lights and sound. Courtesy of the artist.

“Shanghai Today” presents a rare opportunity to interact with works produced exclusively by artists based in Shanghai. Embracing installation and video art, this section features some important Shanghai artists. A highlight of the show is Shen Fan’s 2007 installation Landscape-Commemorating Huang Binhong-Scroll, an homage to one of China’s great artists of the twentieth century. This installation piece utilizes computer-operated neon lights and music.

The city as a direct subject is very much present in the works of installation artists Zhang Jianjun (b. 1955) and Liu Jianhua (b. 1962). Both artists deal with the contemporary realities of Shanghai and its city space.

Zhang Jianjun’s work Vestiges of a Process: Shanghai Garden is an installation composed of two silicone rubber Taihu rocks, manufactured from molds of real Taihu rocks that are prized in traditional garden culture for providing city dwellers with symbolic access to nature. The rocks are accompanied by a silicone rubber vase and both are arranged on a pavement of gray antique bricks which have been acquired from the demolition of Shanghai houses constructed between 1923 and 1926. Visitors are invited to walk through the installation.

Shadow in the Water (detail), 2002-2008. By Liu Jianhua (b. 1962). Installation with porcelain and light. Collection of the artist.

Liu Jianhua’s Can You Tell Me? consists of a series of stainless steel books suspended from a vertical wall. Each book presents two questions about Shanghai’s future, one on each page, that are translated into five languages: Chinese, English, French, German and Japanese. Ever-changing, propelled by its role as an economic powerhouse, the city suggests endless possibilities, some of which Liu asks visitors to contemplate.

For sometime now, the video format has been the preferred medium for many contemporary Shanghai artists and the exhibition closes with contemporary video art, one of the mediums in which Shanghai artists are taking a worldwide lead. Yang Fudong (b. 1971) is a contemporary video artist who features prominently in this section with three video works: City Light (2000), Liu Lan (2003) and Honey (2003). A celebrated photographer, videographer, and film maker, Fudong frequently explores feelings of longing and displacement. His works often focus on the lives of young urbanites who, despite possessing admirable qualities such as education or beauty, may not be well-adjusted to the environment in which they live.

“Shanghai” is on at the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco) until September 2010. It has been co-organized by the Shanghai Museum and the Asian Art Museum, with assistance from the Shanghai International Culture Association.

AM/KN

Related Topics: Chinese artists, events – museum shows, venues – USA

Related Posts:

• Surprising sell-through rates for Chinese art recorded in London’s February auctions – March 2010
• Animamix Biennial – an alternative biennial pushes aesthetic of comic art – interview curator Victoria Lu – February 2010
• Colin Chinnery, director of ShContemporary, on future of Shanghai Art Fair – interview Artron – January 2010
• Which museums are collecting Chinese contemporary art? New database just released – November 2009
• Chinese art market outlook 2009 – Arttactic, AWAsia – April 2009

Subscribe to Art Radar Asia for more on worldwide Asian art exhibitions

What is the next step for the development of Chinese art? BBC video

CHINESE CONTEMPORARY ART AND PROPAGANDA POSTERS

In a BBC clip made for the 60th anniversary of Communism in China, one of our readers Dr Katie Hill of the University of Westminster in London, traces the development of the visual image in China from political propaganda posters of the fifties and sixties to the reactionary works of contemporary artists such as Xu Bing.

Today she says there are ‘thousands’ of people visiting the Ullens Center and 798 District in Beijing every day, encountering and studying art for the first time. She has no doubt that China will become a significant centre for art production in Asia and suggests that perhaps the next step will be the development of a deeper political consciousness of the need to support art.

This would make an interesting reversal of the early relationship between Communism and art. At the birth of Communism sixty years ago art was harnessed to support Communism.

See BBC video: Art and politics in China

Related posts:

• Wallpaper’s guide to Beijing art districts – July 09
• ”Young Chinese Artists: The Next Generation” – book review – Jun 09
• Will political unrest fan the debate about Iranian contemporary art? – Jun 09
• Sixties and Seventies born Cambodian artists in documentary show Forever Until Now – Mar 09 – Hobbled by the political repression brought about by Pol Pot regime of the seventies, contemporary art is only now beginning to flourish again
• Sexual desire was prohibited under Communism says Wang Keping, a founder of Chinese contemporary art – Nov 08

Subscribe to Art Radar Asia to learn about the history of contemporary art in Asia