What Does Shanghai's Rong Mansion Reveal About Prada's "Artistic Ambition"?

After the art collections and the expensive art spaces, the art foundations of luxury brands are now competing over who can tell the best story — and they want to tell it to audiences in China.

In 1993, when Miuccia Prada and her husband Patrizio Bertelli proposed setting up an art foundation, neither the fashion world nor the art world knew what they were up to.

"Maybe they weren't sure themselves. Twenty-five years ago, apart from 'wearing' a painting on your body — like Yves Saint Laurent, who turned Mondrian's grids into dresses — nobody thought art and luxury could be connected in any other way," recalled Astrid Welter, now the foundation's program director, in an interview with QDaily. For a long stretch at the beginning, the Prada Foundation had exactly two employees: her and the art historian Germano Celant.

Twenty-five years on, Astrid has many more colleagues, and the foundation even has a "Thought Council" made up of outside members drawn from art institutions around the world.

The line between art and luxury brands keeps blurring. Beginning in the 1980s and '90s, Cartier, Prada and Louis Vuitton set up art foundations of their own. Early on, some of these foundations quietly bought art for their private owners, showed off personal taste in private settings, or gave young artists solo shows.

In recent years, the "artistic ambition" of luxury brands has become far more visible. That is especially true since the economic crisis, when most European governments started cutting public money for the arts — just as luxury brands were hiring famous architects to build new spaces for their foundations, privately funded buildings with a public face.

In 2014, Frank Gehry, who had brought the Guggenheim to Bilbao, built a "cloud of glass" in Paris for Louis Vuitton at an estimated $143 million. Six months later, a Milan distillery from the 1910s, remade by Rem Koolhaas's architecture firm OMA, became the headquarters of the Prada Foundation. Wes Anderson, the director of The Grand Budapest Hotel, was invited to design a 1950s-style "Bar Luce" there.

Showing at home was not enough. These brands have spread outward, and China is their new destination. Back in 2011, Prada leased the former home of Rong Zongjing in Shanghai's Jing'an District; after a long restoration it opened at the end of last year. This March the Prada Foundation staged its first exhibition there, "Rome: 1950–1965."

What draws the public is still the building itself. Prada's house architect restored it "as it was," so that in the recovered details visitors can read the fortune the Rong family built over four generations, once known as China's "Flour King" and "Cotton Yarn King." The restoration was expensive. All the stained glass was imported from Italy. To make the floor tiles, Italian craftsmen took century-old bricks as models, mixed the colors again, poured the inlaid patterns by hand, then set the finished tiles back piece by piece, pressing and fusing them layer by layer.

After the October opening, the public days were meant to run for one month. So many people booked that they were extended to two.

But a mansion of carved beams and painted galleries is not the ideal place to hang art. Visitors' attention drifts away from the abstract paintings — the stained glass, the fireplace, the finely carved wooden wainscoting, or a wall label that suddenly "jumps out" from a plain wall all pull the eye. One gallery was once "Mrs. Rong's washroom."

"It's a private house, not a space designed for showing art," said the curator, Germano Celant. Since the paintings could not go straight onto the walls, and he did not want the white partitions common in traditional museums, he built temporary walls out of bamboo to hold the rooms to one tone — though the bamboo still cracks now and then, popping as it expands and contracts with the heat.

Germano Celant is the Prada Foundation's artistic director, and for Rong Mansion's art debut he chose a subject: Italian art after the Second World War, and how the country's own artists held their ground in a moment of mass-consumption euphoria.

After the war Italy industrialized faster than it ever had, and people of every class began to handle industrial goods in quantity. A farming country got used to refrigerators, washing machines and one of the first economy cars, the Fiat 500; the fashionable Vespa that Audrey Hepburn rides in Roman Holiday was born in the same years. Italians at the time, Germano Celant says, fell for an illusion — that consumption would bring democracy and industry would dissolve class.

Some artists argued for a return to the origins of art, for remaking "the origin of the image, linearity, and pure foundational imagery." Alberto Burri was one of them. He served as an army doctor during the war, was taken prisoner by American troops, and after returning to Italy worked in torn cloth, plastic and sheet metal.

Germano Celant gathered a great deal of historical material for the show. Four glass cases hold photographs, and the magazines and pamphlets in which the artists of the day issued manifestos or argued in public, among them a travelogue one artist wrote after touring China in the early 1950s. Marxism was the other current running through the Italian art world then.

Next to the new-media art that has filled Beijing, Shanghai and other cities in recent years, abstract work stripped of sound, light and electronics is not easy to "get." Germano Celant wrote a dense introduction to the exhibition, and it is still hard going. People stand in front of Alberto Burri's Red Plastic and wonder how a sheet of red plastic burned full of holes became art.

"I don't think that difficulty is a translation problem. Even Italians reading Germano Celant's original Italian have to work at it and read it several times," Astrid said. She called the debut a test run, a way to learn China's art scene. "At the very least, next time we can consider whether Chinese audiences need more background."

In Italy the foundation's curating has matured. It has its own space in Venice, Ca' Corner della Regina, restored before Rong Mansion. "That means we have to run everything about the project, from hiring guards and paying bills to the daily upkeep of the building." The Milan venue is Prada's permanent home, and this private institution was the first contemporary art space in Milan open to the public, even though the city has long been known for fashion and furniture design.

That lets the foundation put down roots, work through Italian art history, and argue about the relationship between art and society. At almost the same time as the Shanghai show, the Milan venue was showing "Art Life Politics: Italian Art Between the Two World Wars" (Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943).

The Prada Foundation has put on a series of unusual exhibitions. In 2013 it held a conversation at Ca' Corner della Regina, "When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969 / Venice 2013," in which Germano Celant, the photographer Thomas Demand and the architect Rem Koolhaas "restored" a landmark 1969 exhibition and folded new dialogue into it.

In 2017 the Milan venue showed "The Boat Is Leaking. The Captain Lied.," in which four German curators from film, photography, theater and the museum world examined art's capacity to deceive.

The change came after 2011, Astrid said, when Prada acquired a permanent space, Ca' Corner della Regina in Venice. Before that the foundation had only mounted small solo shows for individual artists. With a permanent space it could take on harder subjects.

Last year the foundation also co-organized "TV 70" with Italy's public broadcaster, RAI. One section dealt specifically with television and politics, using news footage from the 1970s to show how incomplete and coercive political propaganda was in a decade marked by the "state massacres," terrorist attacks, the strategy of tension and social protest.

The foundation that once consisted of Germano Celant and Astrid Welter now has a more open structure. The Pradas are its chairs, Germano is artistic director, Astrid leads a group of curators, and a "Thought Council" of scholars, historians and curators sits alongside them. "It [the Prada Foundation] has become more and more like a curatorial institution in the museum sense of the word."

"We hope to bring to China what we've spent 25 years working out in Italy — how a private art foundation like this runs, how it thinks about curating, the mechanics of it," Astrid said. But she and her colleagues have none of the home advantage they enjoy in Italy, and with a limited lease on Rong Mansion, the realistic goal may be to be "observers." On this trip, Astrid said, they visited a number of Shanghai art institutions, trying to understand the local scene and join the conversation. In a 2017 interview Miuccia Prada spoke of the "new customer": "It used to be easy to become a Christian Dior or a Coco Chanel, because you served rich people, Europeans, Americans. Now our job is harder, because we have all these groups and religions, all these different people, and now you have to do better and get people used to it."

Q = QDaily

A = Astrid Welter

Q: What are the challenges of putting on an exhibition in a space like Rong Mansion?

A: It isn't the "white box" of a traditional exhibition space, and that is a real challenge for us — you can't hang paintings on the walls, for one thing. But we have experience with this. Ca' Corner della Regina in Venice was also a family residence, though a much bigger family and a much bigger house. In the end Germano Celant chose to build some temporary walls out of bamboo.

I should make one thing clear: it is Prada, not the Prada Foundation, that leased Rong Mansion. We are only one possible user of the space, and Prada will hold other events here as well.

Q: Is there a connection between postwar Italian art and Shanghai today?

A: Several people have told me that the postwar Rome in the exhibition looks "a bit like" Shanghai today — partly because Shanghai is growing fast, as Rome was then, but more because everyone is wary of the current boom in art consumption. That still wasn't why we chose this show. We have curated exhibitions about Chinese cinema before, but to this country and this city we are "newcomers."

Q: Every work in this exhibition comes from the personal collection of Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli. Is collecting art part of the Prada Foundation's work?

A: This needs clearing up. The Prada Foundation's purpose has never been to show a private collection. I know that some foundations and art spaces were set up precisely to show private holdings, but we are not one of them. In fact, before this show at Rong Mansion, the Prada Foundation had never mounted a single exhibition drawn entirely from their collection.

Nor are the works here necessarily the best pieces Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli own. They may have more remarkable ones, but those don't belong to the "chain of story" of this exhibition. What story you tell is what matters most.

Q: Will Prada's Rong Mansion hold exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art in the future?

A: We are in touch with Chinese artists, though I can't say who yet. I've been to the Power Station of Art and the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. We are still working to understand everything here — what audiences care about, what other institutions are talking about.

(Unless otherwise noted, all images in this article are courtesy of the Prada Foundation.)