The Versatile Master Artist

”You’re giving me trouble again?”

Gu Weijing was interrupted while reading, feeling a bit annoyed, and asked patiently.

He didn’t quite understand.

Not on the same boat.

Xiaomiao was making his money, and Gu Weijing painted his paintings; different paths meant no mutual plans, so why did Miao Angwen keep bothering him?

”Uh... No, no, no, don’t misunderstand.”

Miao Angwen’s sneering smile disappeared immediately, instinctively retreating two steps back.

The revolver pressed against his forehead always made Miao Angwen shiver with a bone-chilling coldness whenever he recalled it.

Brother Hao never understood what a joke was.

In the underworld, they live by their credibility.

You say you’ll kill the whole family, then you kill the whole family. You say next time if you dare to trouble Gu Weijing, there’ll be bullets in the gun, there really will be bullets fired.

That’s fatal.

Stay calm!

As long as I don’t physically trouble him, Brother Hao won’t blame me.

”Gu Weijing, I saw the announcement on the school notice board. An artist under eighteen, does give you quite a bit of appeal with girls at Fitzroy.”

Adjusting his emotion, Miao Angwen said playfully.

”But, you know, the Yangon Painting Association is just a child’s plaything. It’s not easy, but it doesn’t deserve your nose in the air. In Fitz School, tricking girls into bed might not be difficult, but if you show it to those serious Grand Galleries outside, they wouldn’t even bother with it. These grassroots calligraphy and painting organizations with their rustic vibes might even be a detriment.”

”Moreover, you got into the Calligraphy and Painting Association. How much is due to your actual talent and skill, how much is due to the luck of painting with Mr. Cao Xuan, and how much is due to networking and benefits, that’s really hard to say.”

Miao Angwen said with sarcasm.

Local painting associations, they’re hardly anything noteworthy.

He’s certainly not just being sour grapes.

If not for some unexpected events, Miao Angwen would soon become an official member of the Yangon Calligraphy and Painting Association.

Praise the almighty Brother Hao!

Even without the butcher, he wouldn’t eat a pig with bristles.

Faced with the ungrateful Gu Weijing.

Brother Hao seemed to have started investing the resources and power for hype into Miao Angwen, as his ”replacement.”

Joining the Yangon Painting Association was just a stepping stone in Miao Angwen’s brilliant career.

His target was Myanmar’s National Artists Association—and that precious national team slot leading to the Venice International Biennale!

Miao Angwen’s former idol was Damien Hirst.

A master of self-promotion, a god of hype, who often liked to make headline-grabbing news in the media.

In terms of painting expression and basic brushwork skills, even Uncle Sakai could easily beat three Hirsts.

But Hirst could sell his work for even more than Mr. Cao Xuan by capturing attention.

Miao Angwen’s current idol is, of course, Brother Hao.

At the same age,

Hirst hadn’t been out of juvenile detention for long, yet under Brother Hao’s push, Miao Angwen was already considering participating in next year’s Venice Art Exhibition.

Matisse exhibited at sixty, Picasso at sixty-seven, and Yayoi Kusama only got the opportunity at the age of eighty-seven.

Southeast Asian small national pavilions, no matter how insignificant, having an eighteen-year-old participant would already be enough to spark media discussion worldwide.

Even the renowned ”Oil Painting” magazine would be eager to follow him for a front-page exclusive interview.

Southeast Asia’s national treasure artist, the youngest participant in history in the Venice Biennale as a young artist.

With such real credentials and with Brother Hao’s sizeable funds in the art market hyping him up, Miao Angwen’s value would rise explosively like a supernova.

By then, Gu Weijing wouldn’t even count as a fart in front of him!

It’s simply a different level of existence.

”Quite emotional, following Brother Hao made me realize the world is this big.”

Miao Angwen looked disdainfully at Gu Weijing, he chuckled and said, ”Gu Weijing, don’t think that a Yangon Calligraphy and Painting Association endorsement is some big deal. For those of us wanting to go far in the art path, getting signed with a gallery is what really counts.”

Miao Angwen joined the Yangon Calligraphy and Painting Association, not due to networking, but because of an unprecedented cross-border agent signing contract in Yangon over the past five years.

In today’s multi-trillion US dollar sized art market, how much of it is speculative bubbles driven by money laundering is unclear to anyone.

However, as they say, the more criticized it is, the more it’s hidden.

Nobody cares how the auction houses manipulate and inflate prices, or how they falsify high-priced transactions within the financial system.

But those large galleries are very protective of their reputation.

Many of today’s galleries have been family businesses passed down through generations.

Before modern galleries emerged, many gallery owners’ grandfathers and great-grandfathers were well-known art dealers in Europe.

These Old Money groups like to leverage the overall rising trend in the art market to earn more quick cash.

But pushing them into the mud to earn dirty money that could destroy years of credibility, even with a gun to their head, they wouldn’t do it.