Born 1973 in London, England

Education
1995 BA Art History and Film, Occidental College, Los Angeles
2004 MFA from Pratt Institute, New York

Honors
2006 Photo Review Competition Winner
2005 Selected Art and Commerce Exhibition
2005 Selected American Photo 21
2004 Schweppes Photographic Prize
2004 Symposium. Selected by Robert Storr
2004 Certificate of Excellence Award for Outstanding
Merit in Graduate Fine Arts, Pratt Institute
2004 Pratt Circle Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement
2000 John Kobal Photographic Prize

Solo Exhibitions
2007 Film Stills of the Mind, F2 Gallery, Beijing
2006 Chinese Contemporary, Nohra Haime Gallery, New York
2004 Upper Class, Marina Kessler Gallery, Miami
2004 Upper Class, Steuben East Gallery, New York
2003 Wabi Sabi, Bond 07, New York

Group Exhibitions
2006 “Entry Gate: Chinese Aesthetics of Hetrogenity”, Moca, Shanghai
2005 “Faceless Faces Body Files, Nohra Haime Gallery, New York
2005 “Face and Figure”, Westport Center for the Arts, Connecticut
2005 “Il Promesse”, Galleria Arte Mexicana, Mexico City
2004 – 2005 “Schweppes Photographic Prize”, National Portrait Gallery, London
2004 “Hype Gallery”, Palais de Tokyo, Paris
2004 Summer Salon, Daniel Cooney Gallery, New York
2004 “Summer in Winter”, BQE33
2004 “Face to Face” curated by Allen Frame, Pratt
2004 Danny Simmon’s Corridor Gallery Show
2003 “The Future is Now”, BQE33, New York
2003 “Photo 02”, BQE33, New York
2000 John Kobal Exhibition, National Portrait Gallery London
2000 Brooklyn Spice, Roebling Hall, New York
2000 Art Club Berlin, Art Club Berlin, Berlin
1999 Group Show, Kunsthalle Vienna, Vienna
1999 “Criss Cross New Yorkers”, P.S.1, New York

Publications
Levy, Madelaine, “Chinese Contemporary”, Bon Magazine, Spring Issue, 2006
Zahm, Olivier. “Upper Class”, Purple Magazine Spring Issue, 2006
Photo Review, Spring Issue, 2006
Zamudio, Raul, “AAF New York”, Art Nexus, Spring, 2005
“Schweppes Photographic Prize”, Financial Times, 2004
“Schweppes Photographic Prize”, London Times, 2004
Carlos de Jesus, Carlos, “Triple Vision” Miami New Times, 2004
Albin, Glenn, “Photo Realism: Privileged Lives” Ocean Drive, July, 2004
Richardson, Kristen, “Holy Cow” New York Magazine, October 27, 2003
“John Kobal Exhibition”, Exhibition Catalogue, 2000
Laster, Paul,“Brooklyn Spice”, Artnet, 2000
Pohl, Uscha, “Floridita” VERY, 2000



What does it mean to be a foreigner in China at a moment when everyone wants in?

The trope of the venturesome art-worlder in China, captured gloriously in MoMA video curator Barbara London’s series of 1997 Internet dispatches entitled “Stir Fry” has had a long decade. As one Venice Biennale faded into the next and the millennium drew near and then passed, visiting Western curators and critics traversed the nation’s various creative metropoles with ever-increasing speed and frequency, meeting artists, eating with them, writing about them, selecting some for exhibitions. What began as spirited encounters eventually took on an uncomfortable dynamic that came to be known as “seeing the doctor,” as artists lined up to present their portfolios to culturally capitalized visitors in the hope of future success. This tension ultimately became the basis for works like Yan Lei’s painting “The Curators” depicting a Documenta X delegation, and Zhou Tiehai’s exquisite ten-minute film “Will” which uses the vocabulary of early-PRC war film to re-imagine the psyche of the artist faced with such a need for validation from beyond. Works like this obliquely capture the underlying angst of an aesthetic system (“Chinese contemporary art”) whose most powerful arbiters—no matter how many late nights they spent in Li Xianting’s courtyard home—were external to its generative conditions—linguistic, cultural, social, economic, and on and on and on.

This is not the China or the Chinese art world of Hugo Tillman, who arrived in Beijing just a few months before the March 2006 Sotheby’s auction with a camera, a few contacts, and a fluid plan to render Chinese artists as their experiences and memories dictated that they be rendered. Perhaps owing partly to the geopolitical crisis in which his native lands now find themselves, partly to the post-9/11 blog-fed snarkiness of the New York where he lives and works, and partly to the honest-to-goodness fruits of 1990s globalization, which allow a certain kind of person to go anywhere and not make too big a deal over it, Tillman has encountered Chinese artists with a level of nuance and humility distinct to his moment. Tillman’s work in China has been prolonged, a series of two- and three-month stint that seem, for those of us who mostly live here, to run into one another. Slowly but surely, he became a fixture on an expanding scene, an object of conversation among his subjects, a curious but welcome presence making works about people who make works. A New Yorker and a Londoner, he came to Beijing as one would come to either of his native cities—not on an offbeat adventure or a holiday from normal taste hierarchies and expectations, but as an urbanite making his way through just another major metropolis.

Perhaps this nonchalance does not, or should not, register as anything special, anything beyond what the current moment dictates. And yet China has proven resilient in retaining a China-specific set of practices and mindsets, which ultimately work to insure the viability of the very construct of Chinese art as such. Hugo Tillman’s photographs are at once an indictment and a send-up of this construct, playing with the fantastic way in which Chinese artists have been approached by delving into the very fantasies of the artists themselves.

Tillman is an artist, a photographer and a portraitist, a maker of compelling images. Yet in his practice there is a hint of the literary-journalistic aesthetic that has grounded so many groundbreaking texts produced by the New York intelligentsia of the latter Twentieth Century. Like Truman Capote among murderers and townspeople in Holcomb, Kansas, or Tom Wolfe among acid-dropping hippies and 1980s bond salesmen, Tillman set for himself a task of creating based on deep conversation with an environment and a cast of characters not his own. This has required a certain kind of participant-observation, which at its best leads to works that seem jointly produced by subject and author, even as the danger of betrayal inherent in this dialogic relationship best captured by Janet Malcolm in her “The Journalist and the Murderer” never quite subsides. What does it mean to ask Zhang Xiaogang to hold a sword and strike a martial-arts pose, or to ask Cao Fei to don two guises—one male, one female? What did Xing Danwen think when asked to lie down on the ground in a schoolgirl’s uniform, or Wang Jinsong when posed next to a giant laughing clown? And perhaps most difficult: What did all the artists whose portraits are based on memories of socialism—Wang Guangyi, Cang Xin, and Hong Hao to name just a few—make of Tillman’s impulse to present them through a political lens so evocative of, even if artfully different from, the way in which Chinese artists have often been presented in the Western media as political heroes? Perhaps conditioned by social and professional interactions in China, I have a hard time ignoring the power relations behind the staging of these staged scenes.

The range of Tillman’s subjects is striking, spanning the major generations, schools, factions, and friend-groups of the art world in China at present. As opposed to exhibition catalogues and magazine profiles which champion the works or the personalities of a small subsection of artists in China with an aim of differentiating a select group from the sprawling masses, Tillman’s project retains an air of the encyclopedic. In this way it harks ironically back to the data collection and cataloguing projects of an earlier, imperial moment for the West, when explorers really did land in exotic lands with cameras or paintbrushes to capture the new worlds around them. And yet this self-referentially chronicling function is secondary, even tertiary, to a body of work with the relationship between photographer and photographed at its core.

One interesting trend in Tillman’s work is that over time his portraits have come to resemble more and more contemporary photographic works by Chinese artists. The vaguely Gregory Crewdson/Philip Lorca-DiCorcia undertones of the first batch of elaborately staged photos (the portrait of Liu Wei the younger as Lucifer is key here) gave way over time to a more digital sensibility, whereby Zhou Tiehai rows across the Huangpu in a urinal labeled “SS Duchamp,” or Liu Ding trots across the pages of a book on horseback. Sprinkled in are a number of starkly realist portraits—Ai Weiwei eating dinner at his restaurant, different from the photos that appear daily on his blog only in lighting and composition, or Sheng Qi in the darkness, holding his four-fingered hand across his face. This variety of styles and representational modalities speaks acutely to the artistic evolution that Tillman himself has undergone during this long process. It is not a question of influence, or the anxieties thereof, but simply of a freedom, indeed a necessity, toward experimentation that he might not have felt had he stayed at home. And perhaps that, more than any sort of cultural enlightenment won through exchange (if we even believe in that sort of thing these days) may be reason enough to come to China.

By Philip Tinari