Beijing gets a taste of L.A.'s art world in 'The Los Angeles Project'

Southern Californians walking into the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing might wonder whether theyve stepped through a time-space portal and been beamed back to Burbank or Hollywood.

Painted palm trees soar up the walls of a giant atrium. A large Oscar statuette, the kind that normally shows up along the red carpet on Academy Awards night, stands sentry on another surface. Nearby, theres a life-size rendering of a portable trailer that would shelter a movie star on set between takes, and oh look -- theres a two-dimensional studio-lot golf cart too.

On a recent weekday , L.A. artist Alex Israel was bouncing a bit nervously around the space as a team of Chinese scenic artists applied the finishing touches to his sprawling mural, Star Waggons.

Israel -- who normally works out of the Warner Bros. studio lot and often riffs on the themes of celebrity culture, entertainment and the Hollywood lifestyle -- is one of seven artists featured in the Ullens Centers The Los Angeles Project.

The show, which opened Sept. 13 and runs through mid-November in Beijings 798 Arts District, is billed as the first extensive presentation of L.A. artists in China.

Los Angeles is kind of at the center of a bunch of different trends, said Ullens Center Director Philip Tinari, who curated the show with Paula Tsai.

You have some great forces drawing artists there. You have the schools but you also have actual workable, affordable studio space. And its hit this critical mass that -- aside from New York -- its really the only place in the States where you have a major concentration of artists, galleries and increasingly, institutions.

While L.A.s status as a buzzy, dynamic hotbed of cultural production alone would be enough to justify such a show, Tinari said the project was given extra impetus by some personal connections between L.A. and Ullens Center founders Guy and Myriam Ullens, whose son-in-law Laurent Degryse is on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

After spending time in both cities, Tinari said, they realized that despite popular notions that Los Angeles and Beijing, as Pacific Rim metropolises, share strong, specific cultural connections, in fact the relationship is largely imagined, and ties between the two cultural capitals are actually rather weak.

Theres actually very little connection, or even mutual awareness, between the art scenes of the two cities, so it just seemed really interesting to kind of short-circuit that and in a way just bring L.A. to Beijing said Tinari, noting that while a great number of Chinese artists ventured abroad in the last 20 years, New York and Paris were more popular destinations than Los Angeles for both commercial and creative reasons. L.A. has never really been in the collective imagination of the Chinese art scene in a major way."

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Beijing gets a taste of L.A.'s art world in 'The Los Angeles Project'