China's hunger for art in spotlight

People stand in front of the art of Chinese artist Chen Haiyan during the 2014 Armory Show in New York, the United States, March 5, 2014. The 2014 Armory Show, one of the world's top art events featuring the most influential artworks of the 20th and 21st centuries, kicked off on Wednesday. [Photo/Xinhua]

When Jerome Cohen walked into a lecture hall at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1979, he had not anticipated the sight before him. There were several hundred people gathered staring at slides of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and other artists. The 83-year-old professor of law at New York University was amazed.

"It was one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had," he says today. "This was the first talk anybody had given about American art and the first talk given by an American."

The episode revealed the hunger of the Chinese for art and their eagerness to learn about Western contemporary art.

Cohen's sentiments on the keen interest in, and shifting landscape of, contemporary art in China was shared by more than 40 artists, journalists, scholars and curators around the world at a two-day symposium in New York City titled Armory Focus: China, a program of conversations aimed at elaborating on and clarifying the state of contemporary art in China.

"The (Chinese) government stated that this is the golden age for our creative community," says Adrian Cheng, founder and chairman of K11 Art Foundation.

"Two billion yuan of funding has been set up and is being overseen by the Party's central committee to subsidize the production of creative artwork. There is also funding to support museum-building."