Traveling to China, Finding the Core of Art

China Review International, 2022

The dissident in post-Tiananmen Chinese art history has been fetishized by the West. Peggy Wang highlights in The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art that this misplaced attention shoehorns artwork, neglects artistic agency, and ignores how artists in the s responded to a wide swathe of cultural and intellectual dialogues. Addressing this dissident trope, chapter , titled "Spaces of Self-Recognition," probes art criticism and major debates in the s and uncovers new lines of inquiry that indigenize the understanding of post-Tiananmen Chinese art history. One debate was the how and why of bridging the distance and differences between contemporary Chinese art and established centers of the art world. Art critics contended that Chinese artists must develop their own standard and objectives. Rather than emulating Western styles and modes of making art, Chinese artists, critics held, should embrace the history and culture of minzu or Chinese ethnicity. "New Realism," exemplified by the oil paintings of Liu Xiaodong (b. ) and Yu Hong (b. ), gained appeal among critics who found that realist ideology embraces minzu and orients the future of contemporary Chinese art. By focusing on China's social reality and local environments, Chinese artists, as critics hypothesized, could bring lived experience to the center of their art, embrace contemporaneity without succumbing to Western art, and profess "Chineseness" (p. ) without being fettered to the past. Such direction could make China a new contemporary art center. Pivoting on this sentiment in the art circle in the s, Wang, in subsequent chapters, spotlights five artists whose works have largely suffered from well worn, limited interpretations derived from the dissident lens and explores how they used their works to claim agency in their own world. These five artists are Zhang Xiaogang (b. ), Wang Guangyi (b. ), Sui Jianguo (b. ), Zhang Peili (b. ), and Lin Tianmiao (b. ). Titled "Zhang Xiaogang: Bloodline and Belonging," chapter  focuses on how the early works in Zhang's Bloodline series (begun in ) speaks to the artist's shifting engagement with the world and artistic explorations, as well as an art historical lineage in representing "relationship." During his study at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in , Zhang's works were greatly inspired by Review

Leonardo, 2010

The China Journal, 2011

Western understandings of the trajectory of Chinese art following Mao’s death in 1976 have been hampered by several factors. A persistent element is the propensity of Western art historians and critics to impose Western historical patterns, esthetic standards and critical methods to the analysis of Chinese art, its production and expression. This tendency was exacerbated by China’s closing to the West after 1949, which discouraged scholarship and Chinese language study and resulted in a 30-year hiatus in scholarly communications and firsthand knowledge—a situation that invited imagination and speculation that favored an obsessive preference in the West for art that could be interpreted as politically subversive. When China re-opened in the 1980s, scholars of contemporary Chinese art faced the further problem of trying to make sense of an anarchic disarray of theories and practices rushing in to fill the vacuum afforded by the collapse of Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong ideology. The prolific but scattered writings and publications by Chinese artists, critics and theorists were accessible only to those few who already possessed a high level of Chinese language facility including the specially nuanced vocabulary of the art world, as well as a wide-ranging and balanced network of interpersonal contacts. This volume addresses the need for wider access to primary Chinese sources by readers of English.

Kharchenkova, Svetlana (2018). “Sketching the Art Scene: The Chinese Contemporary Art World and How It Has Been Created”. A Chinese Journey. The Sigg Collection. Zwolle: WBOOKS, in cooperation with Het Noordbrabants Museum, the Netherlands., 2018

Over 20 art projects conceived and organized by independent curator Luca Zordan, in collaboration with international art galleries, cultural centers, museums, and embassies, on view at the site of the art fair as well as around Beijing, presenting the work and perspectives of foreign artists in China. In these past years globalization has created tremendous opportunities for global collaboration among different countries. At the same time, it has also generated a unique set of problems and issues relating to the effective daily relation with different cultures. We are finding ourselves more and more involved in communication across cultures, between cultures, among cultures. For this reason, understanding other cultures and relating to them is now fundamental. Foreign artists in China want to examine the work of those foreign artists who have decided to take the cultural challenge of confronting themselves with a new culture, entering in contact with China, and making direct experience of the local environment. The projects presented at Art Beijing examine the perspectives and visions of over 20 artists from different nationalities, ages, and cultural backgrounds, who have been living in China, working here, or at least coming here to produce work. Many of the presented artworks are strongly related to China as they are produced here using local materials; some of them might even appear documentations of social and environmental conditions of China; some others reveal their inspiration from this cultural environment. There are also some works which seem not to have any connection with our surroundings, as if they could have been done elsewhere. Looking at the exhibited artworks, we also have to consider all the cultural relations, human experiences, collaborations and interactions with local people, environment, society, culture, which constitute their process of production. They can be truly appreciated only considering the context in which they are produced and to which they intrinsically relate at the point that we could say that many of these works in a certain way belong to China and are not at all foreign. In fact, confronting with different artistic perspectives and cultural points of view can also help us to learn more about ourselves. The contact with what we consider foreign can stimulate us to understand ourselves more, to know deeper the reality around us, to change our mind on some aspects of this reality, to look at things we have never noticed before, to discover new imaginations. Walking next to each other, we can understand better ourselves and the reality, and contribute together to its development. Exhibited artists: Igor Baskakov (Russia), Francisca Benitez, Maartje Blans (The Netherlands), Antonio Gomez Bueno (Spain/USA), Felice Candilio, Francesco De Grandi (Italy), Julio De Matos (Portugal), David Evison (UK/Germany), Anne Graham (Australia), Guo Jian (China), Elisa Haberer (France), Kristiina Koskentola (Finland/The Netherlands), Ewa Kuras (Poland), Manuel S. Rodriguez Loayza, Gabriela Maciel (Brazil), Ioannis Marinoglou (Greece), Alfredo Martinez (USA), Nicoykatiushka (Chile), Vanessa Notley (Scotland/France), Milla-Kariina Oja (Finland), Viktor Popov, Li Qiao (China), Eugenia Raskopoulos, Bianca Regl (Austria), John Reynolds (New Zealand), Alessandro Rolandi (Italy), Gustavo Rugeles G. (Venezuela), Felipe Santander, Tony Scott (Australia), Varvara Shavrova (Russia/Ireland), Jiří Straka (Zcech Republic), Wang Zhiyuan (China), Martin Wehmer (Germany), Xu Shuang (China), Karla Zapata (Venezuela), Sandor Zsila (Hungary). Partner institutions: Dell'Arco Gallery (Italy), Antenna (Chile), Atelier#2 Gallery (Russia), CINU (Bolivia), Delegation of the European Commission ( EU) to China, Embassy of Brazil, Embassy of Bulgaria, Embassy of Greece, Embassy of Hungary, Embassy of Ireland, Embassy of Poland, Embassy of Portugal, Embassy of the Czech Republic, Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Hippolyte (Finland), Italian Institute of Culture, Lukas Feichtner Galerie (Austria), Michael Schultz Gallery (Germany), Moriarty (Spain), Starkwhite (New Zealand), Embassy of Venezuela, French Cultural Institute (France), University of Melbourne, Faculty of Arts (Australia).

Negotiating Difference. Chinese Contemporary Art in the Global Context, eds. Birgit Hopfener, Franziska Koch, Jeong-hee Lee-Kalisch and Juliane Noth, pp. 49–62. , 2012

The China Journal, 2011

Western understandings of the trajectory of Chinese art following Mao’s death in 1976 have been hampered by several factors. A persistent element is the propensity of Western art historians and critics to impose Western historical patterns, esthetic standards, and critical methods to the analysis of Chinese art, its production and expression. This tendency was exacerbated by China’s closing to the West after 1949, which discouraged scholarship and Chinese language study and resulted in a 30-year hiatus in scholarly communications and firsthand knowledge, and at the same time invited imagination and speculation favoring an obsessive preference in the West for art that could be interpreted as politically subversive. When China opened in the 1980s, scholars of contemporary Chinese art faced the further problem of trying to make sense of an anarchic disarray of theories and practices rushing in to fill the vacuum afforded by the collapse of Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong ideology. The prolific but scattered writings and publications by Chinese artists, critics and theorists were accessible only to those few who already possessed a high level of Chinese language facility including the specially nuanced vocabulary of the art world, as well as a wide-ranging and balanced network of personal contacts. This collection addresses the need for wider access to these Chinese sources by readers of English.

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2015

Critique d’art