Gao Minglu has curated several major exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art, including China/Avant-Garde in Beijing and Inside Out: New Chinese Art, at the Asia Society in New York, but The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art is the largest such exhibition ever held beyond the borders of China itself. Minglu, the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy and the Millennium Art Museum in Beijing have organized a landmark first collaboration on contemporary Chinese art between American museums and a major Chinese art institution. The results are good: The Wall addresses the work of more than 50 Chinese artists in media from the classic--painting, sculpture and works on paper--to the kinetic and ephemeral--video, installation, performance and film.

The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art

Arts & Photography

Gao, Minglu

Yang, Chen

Minglu, Gao

Pei, Cheng

History & Criticism

Timezone 8

Cang Xin is a Beijing-based performance and conceptual artist active since the mid-90s, when he was one of the "East Village" community of experimental artists who became notorious for the sometimes extreme physicality of their performance work. A participating in the group performance To Add One Meter to an Unknown Mountain, which has since become one of the defining images of Chinese contemporary art (and is reproduced here), Cang Xin began to find his own artistic identity in the 1994 work Trampling Faces. Like much of his later work, it explored issues of Self and Other in a way that was both ceremonial and spontaneous, always depending on the participation of others for completion. In the Communication series, ongoing since 1996, the artist has used his tongue to experience elements of the material world from small everyday items to monumental cultural symbols. And in Identity Exchange, he does just that, assuming the visual identity of other people by means of borrowing their clothing; thus artist becomes Peking Opera performer, policeman, mental patient, chef, hostess, and vice-versa.

Cang Xin: Existence In Translation (Chinese Edition)

Qi, Zhu

Tsong-Zung, Chang

Boyi, Feng

Du, Huang

Maggio, Meg

Individual Artists

...since the last revolution of the arts at the end of the 60s, there has been no subversive art; good artists, yes, but the subcutaneous rebelliousness has disappeared in the west, and that explains my interest in China. Whether work is traditionally painted or sculptured, whether painting is undermined by rolloing picture scrolls or by videos, subversiveness is always part of the message. This may be explained by the context: artists who stay in the country want to change things and want to gain freedom of action... --Harald Szeemann Revolution, subversion, and rebellion run throughout this compilation of interviews with, texts on, and works by the 23 artists who won the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards between 1998 and 2002. Jurists included Harald Szeeman, Alanna Heiss, Hou Hanru, Li Xianting and Uli Sigg.

Chinese Artists, Texts And Interviews: Chinese Contemporary Art Awards 1998-2002

Szeemann, Harald

Sigg, Uli

Capturing another side of China, a country currently experiencing one of the highest rates of development in the world, Chen Jiagang's sumptuous, large-scale color photographs of monumental industrial wastelands make us question the usefulness, or absurdity, of the mad development that humans so intrinsically pursue.

Chen Jiagang: Third Front

Becoming: Images of Beijings Air Terminal 3 by Ai Weiwei

Foster, Norman

Art Intervenes in Society: A New Artistic Relationship

#VALUE

Moon in Glass

Unknown, Author

Description: Beijing 798 is a study in contrast--one location, two milieu, fifty years apart. Reflecting on art, architecture, and society, the images and texts in this book offer a microcosm of the radical social and cultural changes that have swept through Beijing (and for that matter China) over the last 50 years. East German-designed military factory turned contemporary art and culture center, Beijing 798 is captured in 200 vintage black and white images of the industrial space and its programs at the height of the revolutionary milieu of the 1950s, and also through an equal number of color photographs of a radically different milieu--50 years later in the present. In the contrasting images of the past--model workers, Great Leap Forward parades, East German state visits, Big Character Posters--and today's images--contemporary art exhibitions, rock and roll concerts, artist studios, galleries, and restaurants--this book bears witness to the birth and becoming of China's new society without losing sight of its past. This unique compilation also brings together texts by top writers in the field of art, architecture, and society, as well as two architectural visions for Beijing 798 as seen by the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the School of Architecture within the China Central Academy of Fine Arts.

Beijing 798: Reflections On Art, Architecture And Society In China (English and Chinese Edition)

Vine, Richard

Eckholm, Eric

Kiang, Eliot

Mars, Neville

Morono-Kiang, Karon

Napack, Jonathan

Peilin, Luo

Along with the expansive title installation, Non Zero documents Lin Tianmiao's career to date, including the string-bound objects, threaded self-portraits and mannequins recently exhibited at the Shangahi Biennale. As a large hardcover bound in white silk with white type and covered in a white vellum dust jacket, Non Zero is a bright new milestone itself.

Non Zero

Tianmiao, Lin

No informed conversation about the development of Chinese performance art can bypass Sheng Qi, whose work remains unusual, brave and adventurous. By 1986 he had already thrown himself into a pioneering practice, working in symbolic locations including Peking University (1986), the Yuanmingyuan (1987) and on the Great Wall (1988). Those seminal events were important contributions to a young field, and looking back at their documentation, readers will feel Sheng Qi's passion for art and for the intense cultural transgression his works represented in their time. More recently, he has begun with portraits of children in a rigorous academic painting style, and through their "destruction" and "revision," constructed a painting language that explores the aesthetics of violence and criticism, and their commonalities.

Sheng Qi: Confidential

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