Art

posts related to Chinese art

Cai Guoqiang’s Himalayan fireworks backlash

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Source: BBC News (9/22/25)
Outdoor brand Arc’teryx apologises for ‘dragon’ fireworks in Himalayas
By Osmond Chia

Via Global Times Clouds of colourful smoke rise from a fireworks display over hills, with the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas in the distance

Via Global Times. The fireworks display was designed by a Chinese pyrotechnic artist

Chinese officials are investigating outdoor clothing brand Arc’teryx after it apologised for a fireworks display in the Himalayan region of Tibet, which drew backlash for its potential impact on the fragile ecosystem.

Videos from the 19 September event show multi-coloured fireworks erupting across foothills in a display intended to resemble a dragon, designed by Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang.

But the promotional campaign sparked a barrage of criticism online, with people saying the stunt contradicts Arc’teryx’s image as a conservation-focused brand and calling for a boycott of its clothing line.

The Canadian firm apologised for the display, saying it was “out of line with Arc’teryx’s values”. Continue reading Cai Guoqiang’s Himalayan fireworks backlash →

The Long March Papers 1999-

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Current Exhibition: The Long March Papers 1999—
September 4 – December 13, 2025
Long March Space, Beijing

From September 4 to December 13, 2025, Long March Project presents its twenty-five-year archive in the exhibition “The Long March Papers 1999—”, unfolding across one hundred days. Alongside the display of 1,690 pages of archival materials, initiator and chief curator Lu Jie hosts daily on-site dialogues with visitors and invited guests at Long March Space. On September 5, Qiu Zhijie, executive curator of “Long March – A Walking Visual Display”, joined the conversation.

Continue reading The Long March Papers 1999- →

Ai Weiwei visits Ukrainian front lines

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Source: The Art Newspaper (8/18/25)
‘Their resolve is incredibly strong’: Ai Weiwei visits soldiers on Ukrainian front lines
As Ukraine’s president prepared for a high-stakes visit to Washington, DC, the Chinese artist and activist visited Eastern Ukraine
By Sophia Kishkovsky

Ai Weiwei with Ukrainian troops Photo courtesy Ai Weiwei, via Instagram

Ai Weiwei with Ukrainian troopsPhoto courtesy Ai Weiwei, via Instagram.

Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and activist, has travelled to the front lines of Ukraine’s war against Russia’s full-scale invasion just weeks before unveiling a new commission in Kyiv. In eastern Ukraine, near Kharkiv, Ai met with Ukrainian fighters and cultural figures as well as Pyotr Verzilov, a member of Pussy Riot who is fighting against Russia for Ukraine.

In a series of photographs and videos posted on Instagram without any commentary over the weekend, Ai documented his meetings with Ukrainian soldiers in forests and trenches, cultural figures and landmark Constructivist architecture in Kharkiv—which is under regular Russian attack—and images of support including the blue and yellow national flag, fields of sunflowers and a puzzle of Reply of the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks (1880-91), a painting by the Ukrainian-born artist Ilya Repin.

At least ten people were killed in Kharkiv and in Zaporizhzhia by Russian drone strikes on Sunday night and Monday morning (17-18 August), just hours before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders were scheduled to meet at the White House with US President Donald Trump. Following a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on 15 August, Trump is pressuring for a trilateral meeting with Putin and Zelensky. Continue reading Ai Weiwei visits Ukrainian front lines →

You Must Take Part in Revolution

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Source: China Digital Times (7/24/25)
Interview: Badiucao and Melissa Chan on Their Graphic Novel, You Must Take Part in Revolution
By Samuel Wade

You Must Take Part in Revolution is a graphic novel by Badiucao, political cartoonist and former CDT contributor, and Melissa Chan, a journalist who in 2012 became the first reporter to be expelled from China in more than a decade. The book was conceived in the wake of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, and follows the divergent paths of three friends in Hong Kong and Taiwan from their involvement in the protests through to 2035.

CDT: I’m sure anyone reading CDT is familiar with each of you separately. How did the two of you come to join forces?

Melissa Chan: I’d interviewed Badiucao for a piece I wrote for The Atlantic about Chinese creatives in exile in Berlin. And then, during lockdown, I was back at my childhood home and my old bookshelf, re-reading my comic books and graphic novels. One day I just reached out to him and asked if he’d ever considered producing sequential art. It was just a passing thought—I didn’t know it would be the beginning of a five-year journey that would end with 260+ pages of a published graphic novel!

Badiucao: I’d always believed the comic and graphic novel forms had special powers to communicate messages. And I noticed there seemed to be a general gap in terms of content touching on China, human rights, and resistance. So I had the intention to produce something. That’s been on my mind a long time. But you need a good story, too. And then it felt very natural to team up with Melissa who is one of the best journalists to have covered China and who is also a great writer. Continue reading You Must Take Part in Revolution →

Nut Brother’s latest detention

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Source: China Digital Times (7/17/25)
Nut Brother’s Latest Detention Highlights Performance Artists’ Precarity
By Arthur Kaufman

On June 30, the performance artist and environmental activist known as Nut Brother (坚果兄弟), along with his collaborator and art curator Zheng Hongbin, disappeared after returning from a trip investigating industrial pollution in Xiaohaotu County, Shaanxi Province. It was later revealed that the pair were placed in a 20-day administrative detention by the Yulin Public Security Bureau for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” A successful legal intervention secured their early release late last week. The incident was a reminder of the repression faced by Chinese artists who use public spectacles to blend art and activism.

News of their disappearance appeared to be censored online. One WeChat post, later deleted, announced that Nut Brother and Zheng Hongbin had gone incommunicado and asked for netizen support in locating them. The post also included an overview of Nut Brother’s previous works of performance art. Another WeChat post, also later deleted, described Nut Brother’s previous experiences in detention and his commitment to the residents of Xiaohaotu County, and it enumerated the various ways in which authorities failed to follow up on promises to rectify pollution incidents that Nut Brother helped expose. Their release was met with relief by many Chinese netizens who worried for their safety and praised their resolve to speak out against injustice.

Nut Brother and Zheng Hongbin visited Xiaohaotu multiple times since 2018 in order to investigate the impacts of coal mining and gas drilling on water sources. The resulting pollution led to significant diseases among local residents and livestock. That year, the artists displayed 9,000 water bottles with polluted water from Xiaohaotu in a Beijing exhibition to raise public awareness. They returned to Xiaohaotu earlier this year to investigate further negative health impacts on residents, which they documented in 12 reports on social media. All of the reports were deleted after the artists’ disappearance this month. Continue reading Nut Brother’s latest detention →

The Politics of Provenance–cfp

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CFP: “The Politics of Provenance: American Practices of Collecting Global Art during the Twentieth Century,” CAA 114th Annual Conference (Feb 18-21, 2026, NYC)

Dear Colleagues,

I hope you’re all well! I’m excited to share with you an upcoming CFP for the next CAA conference in Chicago, to be held between February 18-21, 2026. Dr. Madeline Eschenburg and I will be co-chairing the following panel, and we would be thrilled to receive your abstracts.

The Politics of Provenance: American Practices of Collecting Global Art during the Twentieth Century
Chairs: Madeline Eschenburg (Butler University), Elizabeth Emrich-Rouge (Independent Scholar)

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States saw the rise of industrial titans with ties to imperial and colonial trade and wealth. Alongside that rise in wealth grew collections of art from around the globe, many of which ended up in major institutions across the country, like the Smithsonian, the Getty, or the Met. Accordingly, there is already a rich body of work on the collecting practices of institutions like these and their patrons. However, there is a notable lack of scholarship on the collections of smaller, regional institutions across America during the second half of the twentieth century, and particularly of their acquisition of artwork from Indigenous communities in North America and from global communities in Asia, Oceania, Africa, and Latin America. For example, on the micro-level, how did the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University and the Kruizenga Museum at Hope College amass such extraordinary collections of twentieth-century Chinese woodblock prints? On the macro-level, what is the relationship between global politics and collecting practices of regional museums or university art galleries? What do these trends in collecting reveal about the values and biases of American museums in relation to education, history, entertainment, and culture? We invite papers that present individual case studies or broader histories about this topic in order to elucidate the ways in which American museum collections reflect, challenge, or subvert shared values in relation to Indigenous and non-Western visual culture and heritage. Continue reading The Politics of Provenance–cfp →

Walasse Ting

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Source: NYT (5/16/25)
Overlooked No More, Walasse Ting, Who Bridged Cultures With Paint and Prose
His style as a poet and artist was informed by his upbringing in Shanghai and his years in Paris. He then joined the Pop-fueled studios of New York.
By Will Heinrich

A black-and-white photo of him leaning casually against a sidewalk railing along a city street with stone buildings behind him. He is stylishly dressed in a jacket and slacks and print shirt.

The painter and poet Walasse Ting in Hong Kong in 1953. Credit…The Estate of Walasse Ting

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

Flickering among the major figures of postwar art — the Minimalist sculptor Dan Flavin, the avant-garde artist Pierre Alechinsky, the abstract painter Sam Francis and others — is the radiant shadow of Walasse Ting.

Ting, a painter and poet from China, introduced Flavin to Japanese ink. He turned Alechinsky on to acrylic paint. Together, he and Francis explored the interplay between Western action painting and Asian brush techniques.

In an era when artists were typically siloed by geography and genre, Ting broke free, effortlessly creating fertile connections wherever he went. His own work, at its best, melded the elegance and delicacy of traditional Chinese ink painting with an eye-grabbing palette equally influenced by American Pop Art and the lurid colors of the Florida aviary he frequented, Parrot Jungle (now Jungle Island) in Miami. Continue reading Walasse Ting →

On the Edge review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Shaoling Ma’s review of On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China, by Margaret Hillenbrand. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/shaoling-ma/. This review is a leftover from Jason McGrath’s tenure as our media studies book editor. My thanks to Jason for ushering this review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

On the Edge:
Feeling Precarious in China

By Margaret Hillenbrand

Reviewed by Shaoling Ma

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2025)

Margaret Hillenbrand. On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. ??? pages, ISBN 9780231212151 (Paperback)/ ISBN 9780231212144 (Hardback)/ ISBN 9780231559232 (E-book)

On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China scrutinizes the role that contemporary cultural forms play in rousing feelings of precarity among the underclass—marginalized rural and urban Chinese populations subject to internal expulsion or what the book terms “zombie citizenship”—and its less disenfranchised counterparts. Rooted in cultural studies but with an ambitious interdisciplinary arc spanning sociology, art history, anthropology, political economy, and the law, Margaret Hillenbrand conceives of performance art, visual art about waste, workers’ poetry, suicidal protests, and short video and livestreaming apps as “factious forms,” which stage and vivify class strife at a time when the Chinese ruling party has banished class as part of its political lexicon. On the Edge extends existing scholarship on the well-acknowledged problems of inequality and migrant labor in the People’s Republic of China by excoriating the less perceptible threats of social descent and civic jeopardy confronting cultural workers, online platform employees, unemployed university graduates, tech workers, and other people not usually associated with the underclass. This book decisively rectifies China’s absence from influential discourses of precarity over the last two decades; more subtly, it marshals resurging discussions in China studies and beyond on the increasingly troubled relation between aesthetics and politics under late capitalism. It is the stakes of cultural production that are most salient in Hillenbrand’s searing study: do aesthetic practices that reincite class as a political category assume or reject their own commodification? In other words, are the cultural practices in Hillenbrand’s consideration independent from the material determinations from which they emerge? Continue reading On the Edge review →

Of Color and Ink: The Chang Dai-chien Story

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The Chu-Griffis Asian Art Collection at Connecticut College is pleased to present:

OF COLOR AND INK: The Chang Dai-chien Story
Documentary Film Screening & Director Talk
(Thursday, March 27, 6-8:30 pm)
with Director Weimin Zhang, Award-winning Filmmaker and Professor of Film Studies, San Francisco State University
Charles Chu Asian Art Reading Room, Charles E. Shain Library

Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian 张大千1899–1983) has long been hailed as one of China’s foremost 20th-century painters. Sometimes referred to as “Picasso of the East,” Chang’s paintings have outsold Van Gogh (CNN) and have broken records at auction (New York Times). Yet his thirty-year global journey after leaving mainland China in 1949 remains widely misunderstood and shrouded in mystery.

(Chang Dai-chien and Picasso, 1956)

(Chang Dai-chien, Charles Chu, and Fred Fang-yu Wang, ca. 1963)

Of Color and Ink is the first film (2023, 101 minutes) to document the 30-year exile of Chang Dai-chien through South America, Europe, and the United States. Directed by award-winning filmmaker Weimin Zhang, it is also the culmination of Zhang’s own 12-year journey to unravel the mysteries and controversies surrounding Chang Dai-chien’s political, artistic, and spiritual quests. The film delves into Chang’s extraordinary life in exile, highlighting the global context of his art and its broad impact as it crossed cultural and political boundaries between East and West.

Of Color and Ink has received wide critical acclaim for its cinematic achievement and scholarly contribution and has won Best Feature Documentary Film Awards at film festivals in Brazil, China, and the United States. Continue reading Of Color and Ink: The Chang Dai-chien Story →

Urgent action for artist Gao Zhen

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Dear colleagues,

The Heroes and Martyrs’ Protection Law in China is a so-called punitive memory law: a vaguely worded law prohibiting and punishing views of the past that question the official historical narrative.

Amnesty International is organizing an Urgent Action for U.S.-based artist Gao Zhen, who was detained for “slandering China’s heroes and martyrs” because he employed satirical humor to shed light on the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and criticized former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976).

Please urgently write to the Chinese authorities in your own words or using the model letter below. Please remember to do so in your professional capacity.

With best wishes,
Antoon De Baets and Ruben Zeeman
(Network of Concerned Historians)

Source: Amnesty International (12/5/24)
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa17/8821/2024/en/

CHINA — PROMINENT ARTIST ARRESTED FOR HIS WORK: GAO ZHEN
First Urgent Action (UA) — 106/24 Index: ASA 17/8821/2024 — China — Date: 5 December 2024

Prominent Artist Arrested For His Work
On 26 August 2024, Gao Zhen, a prominent Chinese artist, was detained by authorities while traveling in China with his wife and son. Gao is charged with “slandering China’s heroes and martyrs,” a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. His formal arrest has been approved, and his wife and child have been prevented from leaving China. Chinese authorities must release Gao Zhen immediately and unconditionally, and cease using this and other laws to stifle creative expression. Continue reading Urgent action for artist Gao Zhen →

Contemporary Taiwanese Art — cfp

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Call for Papers: A Blast of Lyricism: Contemporary Taiwanese Art and Its Global Connections (University of Edinburgh, 4-5 November 2025)

Deadline for submission to Professor Chia-Ling Yang (cyang@ed.ac.uk): 28 February 2025

The international conference A Blast of Lyricism: Contemporary Taiwanese Art and Its Global Connections invites scholars, artists and museum curators to submit papers that explore the global significance and impact of contemporary art across regions and mediums. The conference will engage with diverse interdisciplinary approaches across art, design, fashion, and new media, aiming to challenge dominant narratives and amplify underrepresented voices from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other politically and culturally marginalised regions.

As part of our broader vision, we plan to propose an edited volume of selected conference papers to a leading international publisher in January 2026.

We invite submissions on, but are not limited to, the following tentative themed panels: Continue reading Contemporary Taiwanese Art — cfp →

Calligrapher Tong Yang-Tze at the Met

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Source: NYT (11/9/24)
This Taiwanese Calligrapher Brings a Message of Freedom to the Met
Tong Yang-Tze is reviving an ancient but disappearing practice and making it contemporary — writ large.
By Zachary Small. Photographs and Video by An Rong Xu

“Everything happens in your mind,” Tong Yang-Tze explained. “You just express it.” Here she prepares calligraphy before the Great Hall commission at the Met. Credit…

The boulders hiding in the alcove of Tong Yang-Tze’s apartment testify to this Taiwanese calligrapher’s daunting perfectionism.

They are paper — remnants of discarded artworks, crumpled together like used tissues and soaked into inky wads of pulp. Hundreds of old drafts of writing, including many of her efforts to draw Chinese poetry at monumental scale, have been recycled into these rocks over the years, most recently as she worked on her commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which will debut on Nov. 21. Curators call it the most important showing of calligraphy in the United States by a woman in recent memory and say it will bridge the art form from its ancient history to the 21st century.

Earlier this fall, Tong, who is 81, unfurled scrolls on the floor of her Taipei apartment, pushing furniture to the walls before dipping a comically large brush into a mixing bowl filled with velvety black ink. She was preparing designs for the two paintings that will hang from the Met’s iconic entryway, the Great Hall. The texts consisted of sayings from poets born thousands of years ago, delivering messages about values like pragmatism and morality. But in the hands of a master calligrapher like Tong, the Chinese characters are also imbued with nuance — no two characters are ever the same — and moxie, in her supersized work. “Here in Taiwan, the immense freedom has allowed me to focus singlemindedly on developing my art,” she said. Continue reading Calligrapher Tong Yang-Tze at the Met →

The Herman Collection of Modern Chinese Woodcuts

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War, Revolution, and the Heart of China, 1937–1948: The Herman Collection of Modern Chinese Woodcuts

Colgate University’s Picker Gallery invites you to visit our campus in the coming week for a series of events centered around the Herman Collection of Modern Woodcuts and the residency of Yang Hongwei, the Deputy Director of the Department of Printmaking, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.

Please note that on Friday November 15 Picker Gallery is hosting a symposium, “Something Revolutionary: Print and Visual Culture in Modern China,” for which you may register here.

For more information please contact mvanauken@colgate.edu.

Posted by: John A Crespi <johncrespi1@yahoo.com>

Man smashes Ai Weiwei sculpture

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Source: NYT (9/23/24)
Man Smashes Ai Weiwei’s Porcelain Sculpture at Italian Museum
The man behind the episode, at a reception for Mr. Ai’s new exhibition in Bologna, has targeted artists before, a museum spokesman said.
By Derrick Bryson Taylor

Pieces of a porcelain sculpture are scattered on the floor beside a small platform as several people in formal clothing look on.

“Porcelain Cube,” a piece by Ai Weiwei, was smashed to pieces at the Palazzo Fava on Friday. Credit…Genus Bononiae Press Office, via Reuters

A reception for a new exhibition by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in Bologna, Italy, was disrupted on Friday when a man walked in and smashed a large, porcelain sculpture, leaving museum guests and the artist stunned.

The incident, which occurred during a reception for “Ai Weiwei. Who Am I?,” the artist’s first solo exhibition in the city, sent guests at the Palazzo Fava scattering and left the sculpture shattered on the floor.

Footage of the incident captured by security cameras and later shared on Mr. Ai’s Instagram account shows the man forcefully pushing over the sculpture and then raising its broken pieces above his head before being tackled by museum guards.

Mr. Ai said in an emailed statement on Monday that the loud sounds of the sculpture shattering made him first think of a terrorist attack or an explosion.

“When I learned that it was my large porcelain artwork that had been destroyed, I was astonished,” he said. “I never imagined that a piece nearly 100 kilos in weight could be damaged so easily.” Continue reading Man smashes Ai Weiwei sculpture →