Yesterday, as a freezing wind off the Gobi Desert scrubbed the last patches of pollution from Beijing’s sky, a crowd gathered in the Caochangdi Art District on the outskirts of the capital to pay tribute to Frank Uytterhaegen, a pioneer of China’s contemporary art scene, who died early on the morning of December 27 after a long struggle with cancer. He was 57.
The memorial ceremony was held inside the China Art Archives & Warehouse (CAAW), a non-profit space dedicated to contemporary art which Uytterhaegen founded with famed artist Ai Weiwei and the late art historian Hans Van Djik in 1999. For 12 years CAAW, which houses an unrivalled collection of archival documents, has been an anchor to China’s contemporary art scene, a place where the careers of some of the country’s leading artists have been nurtured and where bold projects have been hatched with collaborators as diverse as artist Luc Tuymans and collector Uli Sigg.
Over 25 years in China, Uytterhaegen organized countless exhibitions. The first were small shows in the early 1990s with then-unknown artists including Ai Weiwei, which were mounted guerrilla-style in Beijing apartments. The later ones were deeply influential events. Among the landmark exhibitions were new appreciations of major artists like Flemish Expressionist Constant Permeke and an ambitious survey of the contemporary art scenes in China and Uytterhaegen’s native Belgium called “the State of Things,” that was mounted in Beijing and Brussels in 2010. It was a rare visit to Uytterhaegen’s house when he didn’t have a new artist to talk about, a new catalog or book to show, or a new work on the wall.
Yesterday’s memorial was a remarkably modest affair, a simple selection of slides entitled “Frank Uytterhaegen, Larger Than Life, 1954-2011.” In the room were many of the artists Uytterhaegen had nurtured — Liu Xiaodong and Li Songsong, Chen Wenbo and Wang Xingwei — side by side with artistic collaborators like Huang Rui and Inri; curators Berenice Angremy, Bea Leanza, Karen Smith and Philip Tinari; and gallerists like F2 Gallery’s Fabien Fryns and Boers-Li Gallery’s Waling Boers.
In the center of the room an official mourner knelt and wept, surrounded by drifts of white flowers. Occasionally someone stepped forward to sign the long hessian condolence cloth, or to place tea-lights amongst the flowers. Mostly, the crowd looked up at the slides projected on the wall, nodding in recognition of images of Uytterhaegen that seemed instantly iconic: picturing him bending over a book in Liu Xiaodong’s studio; standing belly to belly with Ai Weiwei; carrying his baby daughter Aiko with his young son Carl standing by his side; idling on a bridge with his wife Pascale Geulleaume, strolling down a country road in Guizhou carrying a bottle of wine.
Even the silent arrival of Ai Weiwei, Uytterhaegen’s long-time collaborator, friend and neighbor, hardly caused a ripple in the crowd.
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