Artist Identities and the Value of Art

In the past year, we have seen a number of stories of authors adopting false identities in which they obscure their gender or race. Of course, women authors have been writing under male or gender-non-specific pseudonyms for decades. What appears to be more recent is rise in the number of white male authors using female or gender-non-specific (here and here and here) names, or using names that suggest a different race (such as the infamous Michael Derrick Hudson who published poetry under the name Yi-Fen Chou).

Now we hear of a French artist living in China who sold work under a Chinese pseudonym for many times as much as he was able to sell under his own name:

Fifteen years ago Alexandre Ouairy was an unknown French conceptualist living in Shanghai, China’s commercial hub.

The country’s economic transformation was well under way and the Chinese appetite for luxury goods extended beyond cars, clothes and furniture to expensive modern art.

But as just another foreign artist in China, struggling to get his work included in exhibitions, this all passed Mr Ouairy by.

“At that time the exhibitions were in private galleries who had to pay high rent and the people who were promoting me were finding it financially difficult to do so,” he said.

“But China was famous for doing fake Louis Vuitton bags and fake Gucci bags and so on, so I got the idea of making a fake Chinese artist.”

Spurred on by the promise of getting his work shown at exhibitions, Mr Ouairy slipped into the background and re-branded himself as Tao Hongjing, taking the name from a fifth-century philosopher.

The re-invention paid instant dividends and it wasn’t long before his alter ego had established a reputation on the local art scene. He was now being compared to other Chinese artists, but his work – neon Chinese characters, golden Buddha statues – had a distinctly foreign feel, which made it stand out.

As Chinese and Western artists have gradually converged in style, Mr Ouairy felt he no longer needed Tao Hongjing, and his Chinese self will be laid to rest with an exhibition opening in Beijing this weekend titled “Death is Going Home".

While the work that Mr Ouairy produced before he changed his identity used to be priced at 1,500 yuan (£150), prices at the Beijing show are up to 200,000 yuan (£20,000).

Mr Ouairy said that while many in the West knew his real identity, he had worked hard to keep it a secret in China, often avoiding press interviews and not appearing at his own exhibitions.

The response from art lovers on discovering that Tao Honjing is a fabrication has generally been warm, Mr Ouairy said, with the Chinese appreciative that he is keen to understand their culture and Westerners “amused”.

But for him, the bold idea that helped to establish him as an artist is simply another one of his artistic creations.

“This was a concept. Like a installation – but a more elaborate one,” he said.

In light of the uproar that greeted the revelation about Hudson, I would be very surprised if the typical reaction to Ouairy was amusement.

What should we make of all this? I think (although many people might disagree) that in an ideal world we would judge all works of art by their intrinsic quality, and not by the identity of the artist. Clearly, this has never been true and is still not true today. But as we make progress in moving towards this ideal, it is entirely possible that there will be over-corrections ... situations in which in attempting to redress past injustices we over-compensate and discriminate in favor of previously marginalized groups.

While some of this might be justified in the short term, the challenge in the long term will be eliminate discrimination in any direction. And one way to do this is to encourage all artists to circulate their work under whatever pseudonym they feel gives them the greatest advantage.