Saatchi’s Chinese show panned by critics

London art critics who have had a sneak preview of Charles Saatchi’s new gallery in Chelsea, which opens to the public on Thursday, are not being kind about the art impresario’s new purchases. It seems to be a case of "nice space, shame about the art": they are unanimous about the brilliance of his new 70,000 ft, four-storey gallery, housed at the old Duke of York barracks on the King's Road, but they are united in their disappointment at what he has chosen to put on the walls for the inaugural show, a selection of contemporary work by Chinese artists.

Brian Sewell in the London Evening Standard said the featured painters and sculptors - among them Zhang Xiaogang, whose prices begin at £1m at auction - were distinctly unimpressive. Damningly, he wrote: "I have serious misgivings about their even being art, sensing that here is the response of craftsmen in a distant land to what they know of current Western art through the inadequate proxies of press and internet. Were they less slavish and serious, we could, perhaps, take them for parodies, but there is in them neither wit nor pointed mischief."

It is a view even held by Saatchi's chum Waldemar Januszczak, art critic for the Sunday Times. He said the show - The Revolution Continues: New Art from China - was a little behind the times. "Saatchi did not trigger the current enthusiasm for Chinese art,” wrote Januszczak. “Instead, he jumped noisily onto a rolling band-wagon." He added that "recurrently in this show you feel that the discoveries of western contemporary art have been borrowed by the Chinese, repeated, perfected and then shipped back to us. Few of the exhibited artists can be called originals."

Writing in the Times, Rachel Campbell-Johnston agreed Saatchi was merely jumping on a fashionable bandwagon and that he had come too late to the party. "He is not setting a new course with this opening show. He is offering a slick fake with lots of funds thrown in. It is as if Merchant Ivory had tackled a martial arts movie." Adrian Searle in the Guardian wrote "One has the feeling that many works have been manufactured with a market in mind... This time, optimism and Saatchi's unquenchable enthusiasm might not be enough."

Saatchi himself, however, is as pleased as punch with the show. He admits his appreciation of his Chinese artists was not immediate, however. "First I hated it," he said. "Then I liked it. Now I've hung it, I'm mad about it." Well, at least he's happy.