 EIJING: When Urs Meile, the Swiss art dealer and gallery owner, first came to China in the mid 1990s, the country’s contemporary art scene was hardly developed.
Art shows were often announced by word of mouth and held at someone’s home. Most of the art wasn’t worth seeing. And European collectors and gallery owners regularly dismissed Chinese contemporary art as irrelevant.
 “Back then, 90 percent of what we saw wasn’t that interesting,” Urs Meile says during an interview at his Beijing gallery. “But there was something that made you come back. You could feel the power.”
That power is now evident for everyone to see. Just over a decade after he first visited Beijing, Chinese contemporary art is sizzling hot. European collectors and global auction houses are flocking to Beijing and Shanghai to find art works. New galleries and art districts are sprouting up everywhere. A single painting produced here can now sell at auction for over $2 million.
Suddenly, Urs Meile looks like a winner. The former architect is now running one of the world’s leading galleries of Chinese contemporary art.
Galerie Urs Meile is a bright and stunning 400 square meter space in Beijing, designed by the artist and self-taught architect Ai Wei Wei, one of this country’s pioneering artists.
In 2003, the Galerie signed a partnership deal with China Art Archives & Warehouse (CAAW) and the two organizations now collaborate on a host of projects.
The Galerie represents a Who’s Who in Chinese contemporary art, including: Ai Wei Wei, Wang Xingwei, Xie Nanxing, Li Songsong, Ding Yi and Li Dafang.
And largely because of that lineup, Galerie Urs Meile is a force in China, one of about a dozen foreign galleries now residing in and around Beijing’s Dashanzi Arts District, which is located about 10 miles northeast of the city center.
The opening last January of Galerie Urs Meile Beijing is notable because it marks another shift in China’s artistic development. Foreign galleries no longer simply want to ship Chinese contemporary art works overseas, they want to have a presence here -- a branch that can find and develop new talent, and a place where they can showcase their own artists.
Italy’s Galleria Continua is in Beijing, and London’s Chinese Contemporary is here too. Australian Brian Wallace operates the Red Gate Gallery, Lorenz Helbling has his ShanghArt Gallery in Shanghai. And there’s a Korean gallery in Beijing called Arario.
Then, there is 53-year-old Urs Meile, who is promising to help professionalize the art scene, to introduce the world to new artists, and to operate an exciting gallery and art center.
 “We want to show top quality art from China,” he says. “And besides, people aren’t traveling to Switzerland to see Chinese contemporary art. They’re traveling to Beijing and Shanghai.”
In May, Galerie Urs Meile Lucerne is hosting an exhibition of works by Wang Xingwei, the Shanghai-based conceptual painter. Galerie Urs Meile is also behind a massive installation called “Fragments,” which is being created by Ai Wei Wei for the June opening of Art Basel.
The major installation is presented for the first time outside of China and uses historically charged materials, which Ai Wei Wei disfigures and reconfigures to create iconoclastic sculptures and installations.
With the help of Galerie Urs Meile, Ai Wei Wei is also creating a massive project for Documenta XII in Kassel. According to Galerie Urs Meile, Ai Wei Wei will take 1001 Chinese citizens to Kassell and “set a condition such that every individual participant has a chance to confront each other with their ordinary lives and and their attending one of the most important contemporary art events.”
 The Galerie explains the work this way: “Ai Wei Wei’s experiment is about personal experience, awareness, and consciousness, as well as direct confrontation and enlightenment the participants have throughout the whole process. Ai Wei Wei’s artistic work entitled, ‘Fairy Tale,’ will record its own history in Kassel in precise detail.”
Two other internationally acclaimed Chinese artists represented by the Galerie Urs Meile, Xie Nanxing and Lu Hao, are also part of this year’s Documenta XII.
In a lengthy interview last April, Urs Meile said he opened a gallery in Beijing to create its own window to the world’s hottest art scene.
The decision shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows Urs Meile, who for decades has had a knack for shifting gears and taking risks.
In many ways, Urs Meile seemed destined to be involved in the art world.
He was born in 1954 in the city of Lucerne, Switzerland, the son of an art collector who also served as director of the city’s art academy.
 Early on, Urs Meile says he gravitated toward art and design. He studied architecture at the BBZL in Lucerne, and then practiced for a half year before shifting to art.
He loved design more than the technical aspects of architecture, he says, and so he moved to an auction house and then to the Kunst Museum in Basel, where he worked in the restoration division.
By then, he was already collecting and growing fond of contemporary art. In 1982, however, he opened his own paper restoration business and, when Impressionist art started booming he also began working as an art dealer.
When the market for Impressionist works collapsed in the late 1980s, he switched to more contemporary art, and opened Galerie Urs Meile in Lucerne in 1992, specializing first in Swiss and German art.
In 1995 he first visited China at the invitation of his longtime friend Uli Sigg, then the Swiss ambassador to China and now the owner of what is perhaps the world’s largest collection of Chinese contemporary art.
With Sigg, Urs Meile says he began touring China, trying to understand its art scene.
 Back then, there were only a handful of foreigners closely following the art scene in China, such as the British art critic Karen Smith, the Swiss born gallery owner Lorenz Helbling and Robert Bernell, who would later open his TimeZone 8 bookstores.
Urs Meile says his early trips to China were largely exploratory. He bought very little art for himself, but he met most of the country’s leading artists by travelling with Sigg to the country’s biggest arts areas, including Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Chengdu.
“For two years, we visited hundreds of studios,” he says. “There was an art scene but you had to go door to door.”
When he brought some of that Chinese art back to Europe, other collectors weren’t impressed. Many experts dismissed what they saw as neo political pop art from China.
German conceptual art was still hot, but beginning to cool down and British art was taking charge.
But stubbornly, the Swiss art crowd was eyeing a bigger boom. In Shanghai, Lorenz Helbling was signing up artists like Ding Yi and Zhou Tiehai for his ShanghArt Gallery.
Uli Sigg began amassing a huge collection of art for his private collection. And Urs Meile began showing Chinese contemporary art at his gallery in Switzerland.
His first show, “Chinese Contemporary Art,” was held in late 1997, featuring works by Ding Yi, Liu Wei, Qiu Shihua, Wang Jin, Yang Shaobin, Zhou Tiehai, Zhu Jia and Zhuang Hui.
A year later, nearly half the shows in his Lucerne gallery were devoted to Chinese contemporary art. In 1999, when Harald Szeemann, the late art curator, invited 20 Chinese artists to show their works at the Venice Biennale, everything began to change.
“This was an international event,” Urs Meile says. “Then we realized, people were calling us asking, ‘Do you have this...?’”
Soon after, Chinese contemporary art began its ascent, closely tracking China’s soaring economy and the growing international interest in all things Chinese.
When Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the world’s biggest auction houses, began holding special shows of Chinese contemporary art in 2005, the boom was in full swing -- and prices skyrocketed.
Now, interest is strong, collectors and buyers are calling galleries, and keeping track of the artists and the Beijing art scene is a full-time job for Galerie Urs Meile.
But Urs Meile admits that working here has had its challenges, particularly in dealing with a group of talented artists who weren’t used to signing contracts or working with a gallery, since the gallery system in China is relatively new.
Urs Meile has managed this in recent years largely with the help of Nataline Colonnello, who has been working for the gallery since 2002.
According to Urs Meile, one advantage for its standing was the gallery’s signing of Ai Wei Wei in 1999. Urs Meile says he now has two assistants who work full-time with Ai Wei Wei.
Working with Ai Wei Wei, he also built a huge complex and gallery in the Caochangdi area of Beijing, a complex that also includes a private residence for the Urs Meile family and studios and living spaces for the gallery’s artist-in-residence program.
That program will bring mostly outside artists to China to work and explore for three to six months at a time.
Urs Meile says his gallery is helping professionalize the system in China, and helping collectors and art experts better understand the art scene in an age of soaring prices and long waiting lists.
“Now you have pressure from collectors and buyers,” he says. “When five galleries put pressure on an artist, they get confused. How to coordinate? It’s important this relationship with the gallery.”
 Prices won’t continue to skyrocket, he says. There’ll be a correction in prices, some ups and downs, and perhaps a shakeout among the artists and the galleries.
But the best galleries and the best artists will continue to thrive, even in hard times.
“The best will always have a good position in the market,” he says. “But for the top artists, there’s still big potential.”
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