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The exhibition “Stepping Out!” [2022] offers an overview of female artists on the contemporary Chinese art scene from the late 1980s to the present day. On that occasion, we had a very good and insightful conversation with Dr. Nils Ohlsen, Director of Lillehammer Kunstmuseum.
Interview: Dr. Nils Ohlsen
Dr. Nils Ohlsen has been appointed Director of the Lillehammer Kunstmuseum (located in Norway) in 2018. He was previously Director of the Department of Old Masters and Modern Art at the National Museum in Oslo (Norway), Scientific Director and Curator at Kunsthalle Emden (Germany), and worked as an Archaeologist for the Landesdenkmalamt Berlin (Germany), highest authority for monuments in the state of Berlin. Dr. Nils Ohlsen obtained his PhD in Art History at Freie Universität Berlin in the late 1990s, and since then wrote several articles and publications on art historical subjects form romanticism to contemporary art.
The Lillehammer Kunstmuseum is mostly dedicated to works by Norwegian artists dating from the 1800s and until today. But in addition to showing highlights from the collection, the museum organises several separate exhibitions a year, featuring both historical, modern and contemporary art.
Which is the case with the current exhibition entitled “Stepping Out!”. Featuring more than one hundred artworks produced by a selection of twenty-six artists from mainland China in the fields of painting, sculpture, photography, film, performance, and installation, the exhibition offers an overview of female artists on the contemporary Chinese art scene from the late 1980s to the present day. On that occasion, we had a very good and insightful conversation with him.
How did you come to know the artistic landscape in China, and how did you decide to put together this exhibition?
This show is very special for me. I never worked with Chinese art before. It's one of the first shows in Norway focusing on Chinese art. The starting point was a journey to China in 2019, right before the pandemic. It was by accident: I met some local female artists who were very generous and convincing. When I travelled back to Norway, I wondered if it was just a nice trip or if I can do something with it.
Then I started to read. There has been a lot of big exhibitions with Chinese contemporary art in the last at least twenty years, but I found out that these books are completely focused on male artists. You usually have something like 150 artists, and two of them are female artists. I thought we should do something here in Norway, something that no one has done before, even globally, which is to focus on female artists. Finally, the concept became a big show that is the first ever in an art museum that has presented a comprehensive and wide overview on art by female Chinese contemporary artists from the last 40 years.
Yet I thought it's not enough just to gather female artists, so I decided to focus on female artists that are working with female identities. I started to collect material, but it was quite difficult, because there's hardly literature about it that gives a wider overview. At least two or three years ago, there was nearly nothing. This was cumulated with discovery on the Internet: every week I found some new fantastic artists. In the end, I fostered nearly two hundred artists, which of course is too much for an exhibition, at least for our museum.
Following this, I appointed an advisory board because I'm not an expert, I'm just enthusiastic about it. We had a very good advisory board, including female professors in gender studies and Asia, coming from Sydney, London and Doha and Seattle. In the meanwhile Museum der Moderne, Salzburg became our partner in the project and joined the curatorial team with a co-curator. We couldn't travel to China in the last years, so we appointed also Chinese curators alongside European curators. Such perspective enabled us to have a good structure, to have good credibility and a scientific approach for this show.
In recent years, a growing number of scholarships and exhibitions have tried to extend beyond the male-centred history of art by spotlighting women artists. Why such focus is still important?
I think the museums all over the world really missed, in the last centuries, to focus on female artists. It’s really overdue in general, not only for Chinese ones. There are incredible female artists, also from earlier times, from around 1900 or even before, when it was always harder for them to get there, to get to come in museums’ collection. I think now the museum community really understood it, at least here in Norway and also in Germany where I'm from.
When it comes to China, it's perhaps even more extreme because – based on what I learned – the whole art scene in China is completely dominated from males. It starts with museum directors, curators, but also critics, book publishers, galleries and so forth. The whole chain is male. So, it's much more tough for them. Of course, some of the women artists in our exhibition are really famous all over the world. But in general, they really have to fight much more to get to the public and to be seen, inside and even outside China.
It’s a big field, almost a new land, and they really deserve it. And we, from the scholar and museum community, we just have to dive into and look for these artists. It can be hard because there are not many books and research jet and it's not easy to find them. But in the end, it's rich and overwhelming.
Besides, their themes are not only relevant to China, they are more or less the same problems, the same phenomena that we are discussing in Europe. It’s about the roles of men and women in society, the different and strange expectations that society has, also political issues.
These artists must be very brave because a lot of themes around for instance the naked body and homosexuality is really a taboo in China. One of the artists of the show, Fan Xi, has been working with a documentation project on lesbian community for I think fifteen years. But she has only created thirty of so photographs, because the sitters are afraid to get problems with the family or with the job or whatever, it's very difficult.
In the West, we have had this tradition since antiquity to show naked bodies like gods or goddesses. However, as you know in China, they have a completely other art history without naked figures. Until today, the naked body in photography or artworks is still widely prohibited in China, and the LGBTQ issues are heavily censored. There’s a need to talk about this. A few voices from the Chinese diaspora talked about that community, but from within China it’s tough. This is why we decided to produce these works in Norway, we didn't want to take the risk that the whole container with the artworks would be stopped on its way.
Did all the exhibited works have been produced in Norway then?
Not all of them, but we decided together with the Chinese colleagues it was better not to bring some photographic series. Because when the whole container is in the harbour, and someone declared this is not good, then the whole exhibition is lost. So, we produced some series here in close collaboration with the artist.
Luo Yang, Cui Xiuwen, Chen Zhe and Xing Danwen are some of the artists who have explored photography amongst other medium. How did you make your mind to select the final works?
The choice of works is really a cooperation, and the artists had more or less the last word. As I said, I had at first around two hundred artists. I tried to find as much as possible illustrations, text interviews and other resources, in order to get a sense of whether or not it’s a strong artist with a lot of different ways to work.
We also wanted to have the whole range of ages. The oldest were born in the 1960s and what that means: they were socialized after Mao. The young ones couldn't be young enough: the youngest was born in 1996. We wanted to have artists from all these different generations, and who are using a variety of medias, installation, sculpture, painting, photography, etc. In the end, the quality of the art was the most important criteria. We made the final selection together with the Chinese curators and the advisory board.
The available space in the museum was also another important factor. Although we had to skip some works, the museum is really stuffed. We prepared the mounting for more than a year. We have a very high and large hall, over 10 meters high, and we had to prepare all the construction under the roof to hang the works.
Did this exhibition “Stepping Out!” inspire you to write, or to search into, art in China?
Yes, I wrote in the catalogue. I wrote about the outline of the exhibition. In my view, there are five chapters or five headlines. The first is protest; the second is role of women, as a role in society; the third is the female body; the fourth is history: how are women represented in Chinese art history; and the fifth is about avatars or alter ego. I think these five headlines give a good idea about the exhibition. These are five short articles about this specific project, but I'm very open for new discoveries from China.
The exhibition will also be shown in Kunstforeningen Gl Strand in Copenhagen in Denmark and Museum der Moderne in Salzburg in Austria. Tell us a bit more about your collaboration with these institutions.
Having partner museums allows you to save a lot of money. It’s also good for your image and good to reach a much broader public. I contacted twenty museums which I believe could be good partners because they are also working with feminism and young female artists. The one in Austria responded very early, the one in Copenhagen confirmed a few months ago. The fact that these museums responded very strongly and very convincingly gave me confidence that this exhibition can play an important role.
China is getting, whether you like it or not, more and more important on all fields like political, economic, military, science, and so forth. The new generation will have to live much closer with China in the future. Perhaps our children will have to learn Chinese. It’s a fact that we have to be more familiar with Chinese culture and Chinese people, how they think, how they work. This exhibition is a fantastic opportunity to try to get to know this country through the artistic perspective.
Which countries would you like to work with in the future?
For me, art is global. If you are a museum Director in Germany, you have to be interested in international art, not just in German art. It's perhaps a very typical German attitude but it is important for the public everywhere, I think. There’s so much to discover.
The next exhibition we will do is with Estonia. I’ve never worked with this country before, and now suddenly Estonia is everywhere in the media because of the war in Ukraine. It’s great to open new doors, to experience new colleagues, new traditions, new histories and stories. China is a very special story, it's such a big country with so many academies and artists, and 3,000 years of art historical tradition. Estonia is another case. It’s a tiny country, established as a sovereign state rather recently after a long time behind the Iron Curtain. It’s going to be very interesting.
It seems there's a nice balance between exhibitions about the museum collection and those about contemporary works.
Indeed. The museum collection is almost 99% Norwegian, from the nineteenth century up to today. There are only three museums in Norway that can tell the story of Norwegian art history from this period. We are the smallest of the three, but we are quite proud of it.
This doesn’t prevent us from having completely other things in the exhibition program. Of course, sometimes we have Norwegian art or Nordic art, but I really see it as my mission to bring the best international art to this region. We are a regional museum, we are two hours from the capital, settled in the mountains, it's very special place. Although there are only 27,000 people living here, last year we had around 40,000 visitors, including international visitors who come during summer time.
There is quite a lot of culture here in Lillehammer. We have the biggest literature festival in the whole Scandinavia, we also hold an authoritative jazz festival, it’s a very special place for creatives.
Your museum has a large photo collection. What’s inside?
The collection encompasses Norwegian contemporary photographs from the last twenty years. Besides, in a few months, we will get a big donation that includes American photographs from 1910 until 1970. We are really looking forward to it, as you don't find such a collection in other Norwegian museums.
What’s next for the Lillehammer Museum?
After the exhibition “Stepping Out!” – which will last until October – we go back to the years around 1900 and explore modernism from Estonia. We had to come back in time, as the last exhibition was also a contemporary one: it was about a fashion designer from Denmark [exhibition “Henrik Vibskov – (PLEASE!) CLEAN UP, HONEY” from 20 November 2021–27 March 2022]. After two contemporary exhibitions, we go back to the early twentieth century.
More information:
Stepping Out!
From 13. May to 16. October 2022
Lillehammer Kunstmuseum
Stortorget 2, 2609 Lillehammer, Norway
lillehammerkunstmuseum.no
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