Founder of Museum of Contemporary Art China Flees Massive Debt, Updates Facebook Page Along the Way

Image via The Art Newspaper

The Art Newspaper, with all its wonderful coverage, delivered a gem of an article on its website on August 6. The reporting is straightforward, newsy, to the point, just the way an article in The Art Newspaper should be. And that’s too bad because the story is ripe for commentary. As a serious news outlet, they are prevented from crossing this line into mock-commentary. They aren’t The Onion. But in reporting on such a strange story in such a way, they also welcome some commentary on their reporting. The piece centers on the general shadiness and debt accumulation of Jeffrey du Vallier d’Aragon Aranita, the founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art in China. According to the article, Mr. Aranita opened MoCA China in the fall of 08, but after only three months and three exhibitions, the space closed in January 09. The big problem is that mere weeks after the space opened, Mr. Aranita apparently fled the country, claiming he had to come to the United States in order to receive medical care for a stroke he suffered. No record of this treatment exists. In his wake, Mr. Aranita left over $250,000 in debt. He did not pay rent on the 7,500-square-foot location in which MoCA China was housed. The agency responsible for renting the space, which goes by the abbreviation G.O.D. (too good to make up) took legal action.

We had no choice but to terminate their lease as Jeffrey had left town without responding to our payment demands,” he says, adding that the outstanding amount is “below HK$1m [$129,000]”. “We have filed legal proceedings against MoCA China in the district court in Hong Kong and in April the court ruled a judgment in our favor,” he says, but declined to provide further details.”

The museum also raised funds through auctions and donated works. In return for these works, Mr. Aranita had agreed to pay back a percentage of the museum profits to the artists. In many cases, this never happened. Saddled with this debt is one Szewan Leung, artistic director of the museum and Mr. Aranita’s former paramour. Upon raising the point that he still owes her 53,000 in salary, Mr. Aranita apparently asked Leung  “not to contact him anymore.” The apartment Mr. Aranita rented went unpaid for up to six-month stretches, and when he did pay rent, he bartered with his own paintings. (Mr. Aranita is also a realist painter.) So where does this leave us? Seems like a typical story of an investment gone bad, a scam artist shoveling his problems onto others, while he skips away. The problem is that when Mr. Aranita left China and headed for the the United States for supposed medical attention, he kept an active log of his travels in his Facebook page. And this somewhat asinine idea has also worked its way into the article as genuine reportage.

On his Facebook page last year he posted references to having undergone heart surgery in Hawaii and treatment in a hospital in Washington, DC, but his accounts could not be confirmed. Recent online entries indicate that by January Mr Aranita had commenced an extended world tour that included Madrid, Moscow, Paris, Tahiti, and cities in Italy, China, Nepal, Jordan, Israel and Japan. His latest posts are from O’ahu, Hawaii, where he reports building a garden and painting studio and enjoying body surfing with his teenage daughter. The Art Newspaper contacted Mr Aranita by email, but when asked about MoCA China he ended the correspondence.”

There are two very strange things happening here. One, if you are on the lam, if you owe over $250,000 to various landlords and individuals in China, why would you update your Facebook page, alerting everyone to your whereabouts? Is it just a brazen dismissal of the situation, or is it complete ignorance? And, The Art Newspaper, though you are very good at covering the wold of art and I love what you do, is a Facebook page a credible source? Be it the Facebook page alone, it might be excusable. But it appears that Mr. Aranita’s rejection to discuss MoCA China caused a further reach into the dark barrel of Internet research and hence the publication of one of the most amazing paragraphs perhaps of all time.

An Internet search found self-published biographical information on Facebook and Saatchi Online (which apparently informed a 2006 profile in the Financial Times). According to those sources, Jeffrey du Vallier d’Aragon Aranita was born in 1954 in French Polynesia, orphaned at the age of three, and raised by his grandmother—a blind village shaman—in Japan where he spent eight years as a novitiate Zen monk acquiring artistic skills copying ancient paintings and woodblock prints. After returning to Tahiti to live with his wealthy French grandfather, he became a pearl fisherman, then at 17 stowed away on a freighter to Hawaii. He studied architecture at the University of Hawaii and took summer workshops in photography with Ansel Adams and Minor White, later studied at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research in New York, then worked as an academic in the US, a reporter covering the drug trade in Latin America and a private banker. He also claims to have an IQ of 143 and to have met Elvis.

What? If this is true, this is truly astounding. This is a novel, not a life. But it’s clear from this article that the only real meat, the only verifiable information is that Mr. Aranita owes over $250,000 for a failed business venture in China.

via The Art Newspaper.