philip tinari

Tin Hau, Jeffrey du Vallier d'Aragon Aranita, color photograph, 2003.

Jeffrey du Vallier d’Aragon Aranita was always one of my favorite bit players in the whole rise-of-Chinese-art story. I remember glancing him from afar, surrounded by a big-enough entourage, at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2006. He gave a talk at the Art Salon about his never-quite-clear vision for “MOCA China,” a chain of contemporary art museums throughout the mainland. It was a talk he gave a lot in the high times of 2006 and 2007. One day in April 2007, he wrote at the behest of a mutual acquaintance asking me to join the “advisory board” of his museological corporation. Lots of people got e-mails like that, and some of them made the journey, as I did, to the swank offices of one of the white-shoe law firms which was graciously playing temporary host to JdVdAA’s still inchoate dreams.

Reading this week’s report in The Art Newspaper that he fled town owing a million HKD to his landlord and another million to friends including his former girlfriend and curator whom he left with the legal responsibility for his aborted venture, I felt a little sad. The boom years, in the Chinese art world at least, were marked by a stream of ever grander schemes by people wanting to leverage money and/or idealism into complete control of the history to come. Every dinner would bring news of a new magazine, a new website, a new non-profit space, a new museum. I eventually lost interest in keeping up with it all. The Ullens Center was only one example, albeit one of the very few that actually exists two years later.

But Jeffrey was different, distinguished both by the grandiosity of his vision and his absolute lack of tangible resources. He would sit up in his friend’s law firm’s conference room and propose a museum that could take over Hong Kong’s Central Market–a site long coveted by major developers with actual money and actual employees. Every chance conversation would lead to a brief flurry of e-mails, which would promptly die out. Everyone who encountered him seems to share this story, and it would have been remarkable, were that not so frequently how things go in China. People from “MoCA Shanghai,” opened in a city park in 2005, used to get offended when people would ask if they had any connection to “MOCA China.” That was before chief curator Victoria Lu left for a stint at “Moon River MoCA”–an ill-conceived art space at a hotel and condo complex in Beijing’s far eastern suburbs with Sikh doormen and probably lots of illegal gambling dens that similarly never materialized.

Now we learn from TAN’s summary of earlier reports that:

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.

I hope he enjoyed his Facebook-documented trip to “Madrid, Moscow, Paris, Tahiti, and cities in Italy, China, Nepal, Jordan, Israel and Japan.” I hope he’s having fun bodysurfing in his new home of Oahu with his teenage daughter. And I hope he sells a huge screenplay about his youth as a Zen-copyist-stowaway-fisherman-photographer-banker-drug-reporter and pays back all the people he stiffed.