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China news tagged with: contemporary art (127)

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For Expatriates in China, Creative Lives of Plenty
The New York Times profiles five expatriate artists who have made China their creative home:
Mr. Rolandi is one of many artists (five are profiled here) who have left the United States and Europe for China, seeking respite from tiny apartments, an insular art world and nagging doubts about whether it’s best to forgo art for a reliable office job. They have discovered a land of vast creative possibility, where scale is virtually limitless and costs are comically low. They can rent airy studios, hire assistants, experiment in costly mediums like bronze and fiberglass.
“Today China has become one of the most important places to create and invent,” said Jérôme Sans, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. “A lot of Western artists are coming here to live the dynamism and make especially crazy work they could never do anywhere else in the world.”
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- January 9, 2010 9:32 PM
In China, a Headless Mao Is a Game of Cat and Mouse
The New York Times profiles the Gao Brothers and looks at the limits on contemporary art in China today. One of the Gaos most famous works is a statue of Mao Zedong with a removable head:
“It’s something I hope all Chinese people will one day be able to accept and understand,” Gao Zhen, 53, said of the work. “We wanted to portray him as a human being, a regular person confessing for the wrongs he’s committed.”
On Sept. 3 the head came out for a Gao brothers “party” — the code name for one of the invitation-only private exhibitions they hold several times a year. The location of the exhibition was not disclosed until several hours beforehand and spread via word of mouth and coded text message. Outside the closed doors of their private home studio, a staff member kept watch for unwelcome visitors.
Removable heads and underground exhibitions are just two of the guerrilla tactics the Gao brothers have employed, often with the help of Melanie Ouyang, their broker, to enable fans and friends to view their work. The Gaos are part of a generation of avant-garde Chinese artists who are pushing the boundaries of artistic expression. In the increasingly open Chinese art world, nudity is commonplace where it used to be forbidden, and art parodying the Cultural Revolution has become so ubiquitous that it is passé. Still, the Gaos are a reminder that, especially as China celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Communist revolution, limits to expression remain: although artists are increasingly free to deal with social and political topics, works that explicitly criticize Chinese leaders or symbols of China are still out of bounds.
Read more about the Gao Brothers and see examples of their work via their own website and via CDT.
The Wall Street Journal also recently looked at the state of contemporary art in China but took a slightly different take on the subject.
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- October 6, 2009 12:51 PM
Artists Test Limits as China Lets (a Few) Flowers Bloom
The Wall Street Journal looks at the state of contemporary visual art in China, which enjoys relative freedom compared to other cultural mediums:
First forced to glorify the state, artists across genres were once ostracized. More recently, their work has emerged as one of the few bright lights in China’s otherwise staid cultural scene. The National Day celebrations are highlighting China’s artistic successes — its sparkling new concert houses and theaters, cinemas and prolific publishing houses.
Even now, though, few artists actually produce works that reflect the issues of the day or can compete on the international stage. And most are still limited by censorship. Every movie studio, theater, music house, publisher and publication in China is either directly owned by the state or subject to state guidelines.
Contemporary art — paintings, installations and other works produced in the present day — is a bright exception. The sector has thrived in part because it almost by definition reaches only an elite few. Yet its success is also due to the persistence of a handful of artists — and to the party’s willingness to let at least some flowers bloom.
The article also includes an interactive timeline of art in China.
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- October 2, 2009 11:08 AM
Audio Slideshow: Art and Politics in China
An audio slideshow by the BBC takes us through the history of art in contemporary China, from the revolutionary posters of the 1950s and 60s to the 798 art district in Beijing:
As China marks the 60th anniversary of Communist rule, Katie Hill, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Art at the University of Westminster in London, looks at how art has moved from the realm of propaganda to the international marketplace.
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- September 29, 2009 9:19 PM
Slideshow: A Visit with Ai Weiwei
Colorful Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei will be traveling across Europe this autumn to participate in various contemporary art exhibitions. French journalist Jordan Pouille went to his house on the outskirts of Beijing for a visit and took the photographs below. To read more about Ai Weiwei, please see CDT’s blogger profile.
Read about the exhibit, Double Happiness, that Ai is co-organizing in Brussels in October. Watch a video of Ai inspecting the exhibition space for Double Happiness:

Ai will also be exhibiting a video installation at MOCA in Los Angeles this fall. Read more from the LA Times.
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- September 10, 2009 12:09 PM
Graffiti Gains Ground In China
From AFP:
Clean-cut 23-year-old design graduate Chen Chuang sprayed a whitewashed wall in central Beijing in broad daylight with big jagged blue letters — his clan’s signature — before scurrying away.
“It’s not really against the law,” said his friend Liu Yuchen.
Chen quickly added: “But once you get caught, it can be very serious.”
Chen and Liu are members of a small but growing group of graffiti artists in China where the craft, once the preserve of Western countries, has taken off in the last few years.
But unlike their counterparts in the West, who have sometimes used the art form to convey political messages, Chinese artists offer a message that has little to do with revolt or protest.
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- August 21, 2009 4:10 AM
Beijing Art Show Excludes Earthquake Pieces
The Beijing Biennale is now on, though some of the more controversial exhibits have been canceled. From CBC:
Under the joint artistic direction of Zhu Qi and Marc Hungerbühler, the giant show focuses on emerging and mid-career artists.
Zhu Qi revealed on Monday that some controversial works had been removed from the program over the weekend.
Those works include performance pieces which used some contentious figures such as Runner Fan — about a teacher who posted an article on the internet admitting he fled the crumbling school during the quake ahead of his students — and another one concerning popular blogger and lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan.
Other exhibits including a documentary about the May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, in which 90,000 people were killed, and memorial to a 12-year-old who died in the catastrophe have disappeared from the official show.
The Wall Street Journal blog has more about the exhibit involving Runner Fan:
Among the Chinese artists slated to participate was high school teacher Fan Meizhong, who is perhaps better known, infamously, for having run out of his classroom during last year’s Sichuan earthquake, leaving the students behind.
Mr. Fan defended his actions on his blog, describing himself as someone “with a very strong sense of self-protection.”
“Whenever there is danger, I react quickly and run fast,” he wrote. The comments made him the target of fierce criticism, with angry Chinese Web users nicknaming him “Fan Paopao” (“Running Fan”). At a time when the whole country was searching for heroes following the devastating earthquake, Fan became such a controversial figure that he was soon fired from his job teaching Chinese language and literature. (In December, he finally found a new job with a language training center in Beijing.)
At the 798 Biennale, Mr. Fan was slated to be part of a performance art exhibition titled “the Soulful Society VS the Net Spirit” (社会魂vs网络魄). In addition to Mr. Fan, other well-known participants included Wu Ping, a Chongqing woman who held out against developers seeking to knock her home down, and subsequently became known as “the toughest nail house owner in history” and noted blogger/lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan. The performance piece was described as involving “writers who have garnered attention through individual efforts given the technological advances of today’s society.”
Early last month, when the news first came out that Running Fan had been invited to participate in the performance art segment of the 798 Biennale, it made headlines all over the Chinese-language media.
See also the official Biennale site and an article from ArtDaily.org.
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- August 19, 2009 1:34 PM
Song Dong: Waste Not
Beijing artist Song Dong currently has his first solo exhibit on at MoMA in New York. Called, “Waste Not,” the exhibit is described on the MoMA site:
A collaboration first conceived of with the artist’s mother, the installation consists of the complete contents of her home, amassed over fifty years during which the Chinese concept of wu jin qi yong, or “waste not,” was a prerequisite for survival. The assembled materials, ranging from pots and basins to blankets, oil flasks, and legless dolls, form a miniature cityscape that viewers can navigate around and through.
The following images were posted by the Sociological Images site, which says the exhibit, “raises questions about consumption, economy, and the things in our lives“:

See also a video from MoMA of the exhibit installation:

And an interview with Song by a MoMA curator:

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- August 8, 2009 8:42 PM
The Collected Ingredients of a Beijing Life
Holland Cotter of the New York Times reviews an unusual exhibit at MoMA, in which the full contents of the home of the artists’ mother are on display:
For nearly 60 years she lived in the city with her husband and two children in a tiny house crammed with domestic odds and ends — clothes, books, kitchen utensils, toiletries, school supplies, shopping bags, rice bowls, dolls — which were used, then recycled, then indiscriminately hoarded. Now the entire cache, every odd button and ballpoint pen, is at MoMA, along with Ms. Zhao’s fridge and bed.
How did it get here? Ms. Zhao was the mother of the artist Song Dong, one of the most inventive figures in contemporary Chinese art. He is often referred to as a Conceptualist, meaning an artist who trades as much in ideas as in materials. And it was he who had the idea of turning the contents of his mother’s home, which was also his childhood home, into the installation titled “Waste Not.” It is at once a record of a life, a history of a half-century of Chinese vernacular culture and a symbolic archive of impermanence.
Although new Chinese art has a reputation for brash iconoclasm, loss is really its big subject. Political Pop painting may be big at auctions, but much of the most interesting new work is less about attacking the powers that be than about regretting the diminishment of the powers that were, or might have been: familial cohesion, social stability and spiritual certainty. In this respect, China’s new art is very much on a continuum with its old art, specifically with the tradition of landscape painting with reiterated motifs of changing seasons, parting friends and dreams of a golden age.
See more about the exhibit from MoMA.
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- July 15, 2009 6:57 PM
Chinese Art Prices Show Signs of Stabilizing
From New York Times:
In May 2007, “The Sisters (Grand Family No. 7),” an oil painting by Zhang Xiaogang, sold for $1.16 million at Christie’s New York. Last month, it went under the hammer there again — this time for $722,500.
That sale sent mixed signals. The 27 percent price fall mirrored the overall state of the contemporary art market; still, bidding was active, and the painting came through as the top lot of the afternoon’s offering of postwar and contemporary art, beating works by Damien Hirst, Keith Harding and Richard Prince. After its initial collapse, as the economic crisis struck, the Chinese contemporary market may be bottoming out.
At the Christie’s Hong Kong spring auctions, also last month, 34 of 38 lots offered in an evening sale of Asian contemporary and Chinese 20th-century art sold for a total $19.9 million, more than double the low end of the pre-sale estimate — which was pitched conservatively to avoid scaring off possible bidders.
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- June 10, 2009 1:45 AM
The Art of Individualism
Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize winner and reporter for the Wall Street Journal, writes on Chinese contemporary artist Qiu Zhijie (邱志傑). Qiu is known for incorporating video and traditional Chinese media in his artwork. From the Wall Street Journal:
Last November, Qiu Zhijie endured a series of personal crises that left him elated and exhausted. The result was another of the mercurial Chinese artist’s bursts of creativity—and a cycle of work that tackles some of the most sensitive aspects of modern China.
[...] Once a 1990s radical who put on underground shows designed to shock, Mr. Qiu is now considered one of China’s greatest contemporary artists. Unlike his forerunners, who completely broke with Chinese tradition by painting in oil and creating repetitive motifs, Mr. Qiu is more comfortable with Chinese themes and uses calligraphy in many of his works.
I met Mr. Qiu in Beijing this month, and after a few hours with him, it’s clear how he acquired his reputation. A gregarious, funny man, the 40-year-old talks about philanthropy, political control of art, the strange history of contemporary Chinese art, General Motors, the Nanjing massacre and the green tea market. “His mind,” says University of Chicago art historian and curator Wu Hung, is “very fast-moving; it’s like a fireworks of the mind.”
More of Qiu’s art can be seen in the Wall Street Journal’s featured slideshow and at his website’s portfolio page.
The following video (in Chinese with Italian subtitles) covers a day in the life of the artist:

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- April 23, 2009 10:13 PM
Chinese Art: Tricks Of The Trade
Forbes takes a look at the collapse of the Chinese art market:
Many saw this collapse coming. They should have seen the same thing coming in Chinese real estate and stocks (See “Shanghaied“), because each market exhibited the classic features of a speculative bubble: hype, scams and insider dealing, all preying on investors’ hopes that they could buy high and sell higher.
In the contemporary art market, as Forbes detailed a year ago, China’s pay-for-play culture was a perfect match for the self-dealing ethos of the art world. Top Chinese artists were mass-producing paintings in almost assembly-line fashion, selling them directly out of their studios in unknown quantities for up to hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. Auction houses were working with lesser-known artists, galleries and dealers to bid up their works and set a good public price for private sales.
Artists routinely paid critics for praise and museums for exhibitions to build up their brands. Want to get prime show space at a top national museum? Artistic merit is nice, but money talks. Want the cover of an art magazine, or a lengthy article inside? That is all for sale–though now presumably at a deep discount.
Yet Chinese art is still selling, according to this report.
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- April 10, 2009 9:06 PM
As Chinese Art Market Crashes, Many Artists Applaud
The Christian Science Monitor reports on the rise and fall of the Chinese art market:
The fastest-growing sector of a feverish international art market saw prices leap by multiples of ten or more.
No longer. The global recession is deflating sales. Today, “the bubble is really bursting,” says Beijing painter Zhao Gang, as prices tumble by nearly one-third and record-setting Chinese artists watch their works go unsold at auction.
But few people in the art world here are lamenting the end of an overheated era. “Chinese artists were seen as ATMs,” says Jerome Sans, director of the nonprofit Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. “Maybe now they’ll stop creating for the market and create for the mind.”
Maybe too, he suggests, as the internationally fueled boom runs out of steam, local artists will turn their attention to local buyers, who are just beginning to build a collectors’ market.
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- April 7, 2009 10:39 PM
China’s Irrepressible Modern Art Scene
April Austin of the Christian Science Monitor covers Chinese contemporary art and the story of one of its most prominent collectors, former ambassador Uli Sigg:
China sits atop a gold mine of contemporary art that few people have ever seen, either inside or outside the country. An exhibition near Boston unveils an unexpected side of China – colorful, winsome, and touched with a subversive kind of humor.
The art falls roughly into two categories: a celebration of the individual over the collective experience, and the adaptation of traditional methods and forms into entirely new objects. From juiced-up portraits of Chairman Mao Zedong to misty landscapes composed of human bodies, Chinese contemporary art has emerged as a heavyweight contender on the global scene.
Proof can be found in the exhibition “Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection” at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. About 100 objects, from paintings and photographs to installations and video, offer a glimpse of the vitality and diversity of Chinese culture.
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- March 28, 2009 3:20 PM
103 Famous Faces in One Painting
An oil painting of 100 historical personages is one of the Internet’s newest sensations. Figures ranging from Fidel Castro to Shirley Temple are depicted in the large-scale 20′ x 8.5′ (6m x 2.6m) work entitled “Discussing the Divine Comedy With Dante.” Three additional faces — pushing up the count of faces in the painting to 103 — belong to the artists themselves. From Telegraph:
Message boards have erupted with contests to identify all those featured, who range from instantly recognisable figures like Gandhi to some more obscure figures such as Liu Xiang, the Chinese hurdler who limped out of the Beijing Olympics in the summer.
An element of mystery also surrounds that origins of the picture, which appears to have drawn inspiration from Raphael’s Renaissance fresco The School of Athens.
[...]They created the oil painting – titled Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante – in 2006, although it has only become a viral internet hit in the past few weeks.
Sina reveals more about the painting and its three artists in its article “Deciphering History’s Most Mysterious Oil Painting,” selectively translated by CDT:
On the Chinese elements in the painting:
One netizen said that it seems like there is Pu-erh tea and a tea biscuit in front of Mao Zedong, placed there as if to relate some aspects of Chinese tea culture. However, artist Dai Dudu says that it is a tile end with a dragon depiction on it. Indeed, as many netizens have noted, the painting includes many Chinese elements: a red tablecloth with a China map, Chinese bronze vessels, and a broken ancient wheel — did you see all of these?
有网友曾说，毛泽东面前放的好像是普洱茶，而且是个茶饼，为的是宣传中国的茶文化。不过据戴都都证实，原来这是一个汉代的瓦当，上面还有龙纹呢。其实正如许多网友看出的那样，这里面有不少的中国元素，如红桌布上的中国地图、青铜器、破损的古代车轮，这些你都看出来了吗？
On the presence of the camera at the painting’s right-hand side:
It is now certain that the figure in the painting’s right-hand side above Yue Fei is Mei Lanfang. But what is he holding, and what is its significance? As many netizens have pointed out, he has a camera in his hand. According to this writer, the camera is used to express a kind of relaxed and humorous side. But it also creates a link — the camera captures life as well as the painting’s external surroundings, effectively creating a connection with the viewers.
现在可以确定，在画面右侧中部岳飞上方的是梅兰芳，可他拿的是什么？有什么含义呢？其实有不少网友都看出来了，手里拿的是个照相机。作者说了，道具就是为了表达轻松、诙谐的感觉，但又和本人有某种联系。梅兰芳手举相机，既是在照生活，也是在照画面外边的景物，是和观众的一种交流。
On the artists:
The creators are Chinese artists. They are Dai Dudu, Liaoning Art Institute’s Vice President; Li Tiezi, contemporary oil painter; Zhang Anjun, chairman of the Shenyang Youth Association of Artists, and contemporary oil painter. Dai Dudu led the effort.
According to Dai Dudu, the three began work on the painting in 2006, completing it 10 months later. “At the time, we wanted to represent world history within a single painting. We wanted to showcase the world’s story, and let viewers feel as if they were flipping the pages of a history book,” Dai said.
这幅作品的创作者是中国人，他们是——戴都都，辽宁画院副院长；李铁子，当代著名油画家；张安君，沈阳市青年美协主席、著名油画家。其中，戴都都是主要构思和创意者，也算是三人创作团队的领军人物。
[...]戴都都介绍说，他们是从2006年开始创作这幅画，前后历时10个月。“当时就是想把世界史画成一幅画，讲讲世界故事，让大家感觉像是在翻一本历史书一样。”他说。
Interesting facts about the painting:
A few other inclusions were made in the hopes that the painting would have romantic and even humorous elements. For example, there is a typewriter in front of [Chinese poet] Li Bai. To Liu Xiang’s side is [Kofi] Annan playing a flute, which expresses a relaxed spirit. To the left is George W. Bush, looking through a telescope while Bin Laden stands behind him. Artist Dai Dudu includes a stroke of chance: conveniently, Saddam Hussein is within Bush’s line of vision.
一些道具的运用是希望画面能传达出一种浪漫、随意，甚至是诙谐。比如在李白面前放一个打字机，既有联系，又很浪漫；刘翔旁边的安南吹着笛子，表达一种放松的状态。右上角的小布什拿个望远镜，背后却是他怎么也找不到的本·拉登，戴都都表示是种巧合，其实顺着小布什望远镜的方向，可以看到萨达姆。
The three painters are depicted next to Dante in the upper right-hand corner of the painting.
The non-Chinese figures are:
Dante, Archimedes, Gates, Lenin, Pele, Tutankhamen, Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam, Chopin, Hepburn, Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Bethune, Gorky, Pushkin, Charles de Gaulle, Paul, Bill Clinton, Peter the Great, Matisse, Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill, Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Elvis, Stalin, Da Vinci, Marx, Engels, Goethe, Nietzsche,Robert Caro, Shakespeare , Mozart, Napoleon, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Marlon Brando, Yasser Arafat, Monroe, Washington, Lincoln, Marie Curie, Rodin, Picasso, Caesar, Osama bin Laden, Bush, Luciano Pavarotti, Dali, Jordan, Sharon, Chennault, Charles, Kofi Annan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Hideki Tojo, Mother Teresa, Michelangelo, Bismarck, Nobel, Tagore, Rousseau, Van Gogh, Eisenhower, Lautrec, Corneliu Baba, Gandhi, Noah, Einstein, Tolstoy, Hans Christian Andersen, Spielberg, Shirley Temple, Tyson, Vladimir Putin, Juan Antonio Samaranch, Freud, Elizabeth II.
但丁、阿基米德、盖茨、列宁、贝利、图坦卡蒙法老、希特勒、墨索里尼、萨达姆、肖邦、赫本、福特、卓别林、白求恩、高尔基、普希金、戴高乐、保尔、克林顿、彼得大帝、马蒂斯、撒切尔夫人、丘吉尔、罗斯福、海明威、猫王、斯大林、达芬奇、马克思、恩格斯、歌德、尼采、罗伯特·卡帕、莎士比亚、莫扎特、拿破仑、切格瓦拉、卡斯特罗、马龙白兰度、阿拉法特、梦露、华盛顿、林肯、居里夫人、罗丹、毕加索、凯撒、拉登、布什、帕瓦罗蒂、达利、乔丹、沙龙、陈纳德、查尔斯、安南、戈尔巴乔夫、东条英机、德兰修女、米开朗基罗、俾斯麦、诺贝尔、泰戈尔、卢梭、梵高、艾森豪威尔、劳特累克、柯尔尼留、甘地、诺亚、爱因斯坦、托尔斯泰、安徒生、斯皮尔伯格、秀兰·邓波儿、泰森、普京、萨马兰奇、弗洛伊德、伊丽莎白二世。
The Chinese figures are:
Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Confucius, Laozi, Li Bai, Sun Yatsen, Chiang Kai-shek, Qin Shi Huang, Genghis Khan, Cixi, Song Qingling, Mei Lanfang, Run Run Shaw, Lu Xun, Lei Feng, Guan Yu, Liu Baishi, Qi Baishi, Bruce Lee, Liu Xiang, and Cui Jian.
画中的中国人有毛泽东、周恩来、邓小平、孔子、老子、李白、孙中山、蒋介石、秦始皇、成吉思汗、慈禧、宋庆龄、梅兰芳、邵逸夫、鲁迅、雷锋、关羽、齐白石、李小龙、刘翔、崔健。
Click here for the full image. This site has an interactive version of the painting that gives the name of each person when you hover the mouse over their image, with a link to their Wikipedia page. Note: There are discrepancies between the names in the list provided by Sina (above) and the list at the external site.
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- March 20, 2009 3:39 PM