One year after the launch of Leap, China's most influential bilingual art magazine, it quietly slipped into cyberspace this February, without trying to make a big splash.
"I feel like launch parties for websites are a bad idea. It gives you bad flashbacks from 90s," editor-in-chief Philip Tinari says, referring to the free spending days of jeans-to-riches IPOs before the first dot-com bubble burst.
The Chinese art world has also seen some bubble-like run ups in the last few years.
"It feels like the system runs on speculation," the 31-year-old Harvard and Duke graduate says, adding that the market has "suffered from a lack of a reliable arbiter."
Many Chinese magazines boost artists who have no chance internationally, and a lot of people who don't know much about art entered the market, he says. The result is work rising to the top because of powerful backers and speculation.
"I just don't think there is as much of an enshrined history of what is worthy," says Tinari, who teaches criticism and theory at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and was a Fulbright fellow at Peking University.
His magazine hopes to change that, offering a reality check and frame of reference that crosses into both the Chinese and international art market.
The articles and reviews in Leap are written by a small, idealistic, closely knit group of critics, none of whom are working for commercial art galleries, says Tinari, who has written for Artforum and The New York Times Magazine.
"Everything is for rent, even at National Museum of China. We are space for independent criticism," he says.
"In terms of art and the art market, we are about not being interfered with."
That said, the pages of the magazine are for rent, and not just for ads. It accepts money from brands to do articles, signaling this by using words like "special collaboration" and different fonts. The words "advertisement" or "advertorial" do not appear.
Leap has written about Channel's links with the art world, an exhibition sponsored by Smart cars, and high-end appliances by Haier.
"All these things have to do with art, but are not artworks that are for sale. This removed a step from the flow of the art market. We never do sponsored reviews of exhibitions," he says. "I think the model of the contemporary magazine is Monocle, creating sponsored content that is good to read."
The website took six months to develop, longer than he expected. "In Chinese terms, you could build a skyscraper in that time."
Although the content on the website and the magazine is the same, he's not worried about cannibalizing print sales.
"Advertisers in China are very committed to the printed form," he says. People buy Leap because it is "a very beautiful object in its own right." Although at 50 yuan ($7) the magazine is expensive in Chinese terms, Tinari says his customers won't be deterred.
For all of the emphasis on the printed product, Tinari admits it has been embarrassing at times to have no online presence in the past year.
"It looks like you don't really exist," he says.