Art

posts related to Chinese art

Underground artists giving comic relief

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Source: Sixth Tone (6/5/18)
The Underground Artists Giving China Comic Relief
From instant noodle monsters to sad seals, China’s indie artists are using their imagination to represent real life.
By Yin Yijun

Frames from ‘Instant Noodle’ by comic artist Hu Xiaojiang, 2008. Courtesy of Hu Xiaojiang

In a crowded train car, angry monsters are devouring passengers. Their wriggling tentacles smash through the glass windows, sending one hapless thermos flying before tearing travelers limb from limb. But these bloodthirsty creatures have humble origins: an average carton of instant noodles.

The nightmarish black-and-white scene is just a figment of independent comic artist Hu Xiaojiang’s wild imagination, but there’s realism at its core. Hu drew “Instant Noodle” in 2008, when a catastrophic snowstorm left millions stranded as they traveled home during the Spring Festival holiday. The chaos saw instant noodles — which typically go for less than 10 yuan ($1.60) per package — skyrocket to 100 yuan each. Continue reading →

Cambria book launch at iPreciation

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A double book launch for Painting History: China’s Revolution in a Global Context and Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics will be held on July 14, 2018 (Saturday) at 2–5 p.m. at iPreciation (Singapore), a premier gallery that showcases the best of modern and contemporary Asian Art, including the works of Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian. Attendees will have the rare, exclusive opportunity to meet authors Mr. Shen Jiawei and Dr. Mabel Lee, who will be giving talks about their books. Continue reading →

Art professor sacked over plagiarism

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Source: SCMP (4/29/18)
Chinese art professor sacked after award-winning poster series found to be plagiarised
Fan Yu has lost his job and his Red Dot design award after it emerged he had borrowed many elements of a work by British illustrator Russell Cobb
By Sidney Leng

Fan Yu’s poster (left) and a work by British artist Russell Cobb (right). Photo: Chaoxiart

A Chinese art professor has been sacked after he was found to have plagiarised the work of a British illustrator for a poster series that won him an international award, a mainland newspaper reports.

The Xian Academy of Fine Arts said Fan Yu was dismissed from his job on Friday after the school confirmed the plagiarism, Chengdu Business Daily reported on Saturday.

Fan’s artwork won the Red Dot: Best of the Best award for communication design in October, but has been stripped of the prize following the revelation, according to the report. Continue reading →

October Dedicationss

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Announcing October Dedications, the selected poems of Mang Ke 芒克, edited and translated by Lucas Klein, with further translations by Huang Yibing and Jonathan Stalling—part of the Jintian series jointly published by Zephyr and The Chinese University Press.

Mang Ke (b. 1950, penname of Jiang Shiwei 姜世伟) began writing poetry as a sent-down youth in Baiyangdian, rural Hebei province, during the Cultural Revolution. As co-founder of the PRC’s first unofficial literary journal Jintian (Today) in 1978, he is one of the progenitors of what would later be called Obscure or “Misty” Poetry, with spare, impressionistic poems that were among the first to break free of the imposed discourse of Maoism towards an image-based literary style that left space for both expression and interpretation. He currently makes his living as an abstract painter and lives in Songzhuang, an artists’ colony on the outskirts of Beijing. Continue reading →

Visualising Asia–cfp

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Visualising Asia: Deciphering ‘Otherness’ in Visual and Material Cultures
SOAS, University of London
21stSeptember 2018

Confirmed Keynote: Dr Anne Witchard

Historically, Asia has been a contended space of exploration and domination, where both Asian and non-Asian agents sought to define themselves against others. Within this broad historical and geographical context,this international and interdisciplinary conference brings together various forms of visuals, such as films, cartoons, and objects, in their interaction with discourses of ‘other’.  The platforms of visualising Asia were assimilated into daily life and practices, feeding into narratives that transcend any single medium. Due to their visual impact, they became lasting repositories of imagined identities and thus have critical implications for those representing and those being represented. This conference invites discussions on the differing ways ‘otherness’ has been used in both Asian and non-Asian societies through visuals. We encourage the participation from postgraduates, career researchers, scholars, curators, practitioners, and archivists.  The aim is to bring together an array of visualities from across various disciplines in order to reflect on the importance of visuals in knowledge production and circulation within and across cultures and societies. Continue reading →

Personal data on a museum wall

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Source: NYT (4/13/18)
The Personal Data of 346,000 People, Hung on a Museum Wall
By SUI-LEE WEE

Last week, the authorities in Wuhan, China, ordered Deng Yufeng’s exhibition of personal data shut down after two days and began investigating him on suspicion of amassing the information illegally.CreditDeng Yufeng

BEIJING — Deng Yufeng wanted to create art that prods people to question their lack of data privacy. What better way, he reasoned, than to buy the personal information of more than 300,000 Chinese people off the internet and display it in a public exhibition?

The police did not appreciate the irony.

Last week, the authorities in the Chinese city of Wuhan shut down Mr. Deng’s exhibition in a local museum after two days and told him that he was being investigated on suspicion of amassing the information through illegal means. Continue reading →

Mabel Lee lecture

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Professor Mabel Lee, Distinguished Professor in the “Chinese Culture in a World Context” research project at the Open University of Hong Kong, will be giving a lecture “Transcending Cultural Traditions: Lu Xun and Gao Xingjian” on March 19 (Monday) at 2:30 p.m. at the OUHK Main Campus in the B0614, 6/F. Professor Lee is best known for her translations of Nobel Laureate of Literature Gao Xingjian’s writings and as coeditor of The University of Sydney East Asian Series (1986–2000). There will also be a double launch of Professor Lee’s latest books, Painting History: China’s Revolution in a Global Context by Shen Jiawei and Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics (coedited with Liu Jianmei, HKUST). The two books have just been published and will also be launched at the Cambria booth at the AAS 2018 conference in Washington, DC.

Ben Goodman <bgoodman@cambriapress.com>

Turning rubble of evictions into art

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Source: NYT (3/10/18)
Turning the Rubble of China’s Mass Evictions Into Protest Art
查看简体中文版 | 查看繁體中文版
By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

Yang Qian with his installations at an art gallery in Beijing. He has used objects from demolished migrant neighborhoods to portray what he calls a “discarded class” of people. CreditGiulia Marchi for The New York Times

BEIJING — When the authorities demolished tens of thousands of homes occupied by migrant workers in Beijing last year, turning entire city blocks into flattened wasteland, the artist Yang Qian went to work.

Mr. Yang scavenged through piles of rubble, recovering hundreds of objects, including stuffed animals, broken glasses and scarlet-red children’s shoes. He sealed the objects in crystal columns to display at a Beijing art gallery, hoping to convey the idea that wealthier people treat the migrants, who come from poor rural areas in search of work, like garbage. Continue reading →

Lo Ch’ing exhibition

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The Poet’s Brush: Chinese Ink Paintings by Lo Ch’ing  
February 1 – March 17
Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC

The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) presents an exhibition of paintings by Lo Ch’ing (羅青), a Taiwanese poet-painter working in contemporary ink art. The exhibition, curated by University of Maryland professor Jason Kuo, comprises 30 artworks and represents the artist’s first show in the United States in ten years. Critically acclaimed both in Taiwan and China for his painting and his poetry, Lo Ch’ing’s works have been shown internationally at venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Saatchi Gallery in London. Continue reading →

update on Gui Minhai

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Update on the Swedish publisher Gui Minhai, imprisoned in China since October 2015:

The good news is that his daughter Angela accepted the International Publishing Assn. Voltaire prize, for freedom of publishing, for her father currently imprisoned in China. The prize was issued in Delhi. See:

https://publishingperspectives.com/2018/02/gui-minhai-daughter-ipa-congress-freedom-to-publish/   (English)
https://www.svt.se/kultur/gui-minhais-dotter-om-tv-framtradandet-uppenbart-manusfort  (Swedish/English w. video) Continue reading →

Zhang Hongtu: Van Gogh/Bodhidarma

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ZHANG HONGTU: VAN GOGH/BODHIDHARMA
张宏图： 梵高／达摩
February 16 – April 15, 2018
Opening & Artist Talk: 2 – 3:15 PM, Friday, February 16
Reception & Gallery Walk: 3:15 – 4:30 PM, Friday, February 16
Charles Chu Room, Shain Library
Chu-Griffis Asian Art Collection
Connecticut College

“Zhang Hongtu: Van Gogh/Bodhidharma” will open at Connecticut College on Friday, February 16, 2-4:30pm, featuring the Van Gogh-Bodhidharma 梵高–达摩 series (2007-2014) of internationally renowned, New York based Chinese artist Zhang Hongtu 张宏图. It consists of 39 ink paintings in total, “remaking” all of Vincent van Gogh’s extant self-portraits in the style of classical Zen portraits of Bodhidharma, the founding patriarch of Zen Buddhism. This will be the first time that this series has been exhibited together. The artist has also created a new video installation specifically for this show. Continue reading →

Centre for Chinese Visual Arts 2018–cfp

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Dear colleagues

Below is a Call for Papers for our Centre’s coming 11th annual conference, on the the theme of “Everyday Legend: Reinventing Tradition in Contemporary Chinese Art”. We welcome contributions that are interested in exploring the relationship between traditional craft and contemporary art, from different perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds. Please feel free to circulate the below information.

Thank you and with warm regards

Hiu Man Chan
RA & Leverhulme Project Facilitator
Centre for Chinese Visual Arts
Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
Birmingham City University
hiu-man.chan@bcu.ac.uk | ccva.org.uk
+44 (0)1213317457 | WeChat: ccvauk

Call for Papers

The 11th Annual Conference, the Centre for Chinese Visual Art, Birmingham City University
Everyday Legend: Reinventing Tradition in Contemporary Chinese art
Monday and Tuesday, 10-11 September 2018
School of Art, Birmingham City University
Margaret Street, Birmingham, B3 3BX, England

The Centre for Chinese Visual Arts (CCVA) at Birmingham City University aims to foster new understandings and perspectives of Chinese contemporary arts, design and visual culture through interdisciplinary practices and theoretical studies. During its first decade, CCVA has established a unique position in the UK to pioneer research in the field. We are now convening this two-day conference to invite researchers, curators, art historians, critics and artists at all stages of their careers worldwide to contribute to the above topic. Continue reading →

New Wang Hui translations

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Two new pieces by Wang Hui of possible interest to list members were recently published in English online. These translations, which I did with fellow Ph.D. student Benjamin Kindler, cover a wide range of topics in Chinese revolutionary and cultural history.

The first is actually an interview between Wang and the curators of the Guggenheim exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World”. It can be downloaded here:

https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/checklist/socialism-art-and-the-significance-of-1989-an-interview-with-historian-wang-hui

The second piece is a lengthy article printed in the special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (vol. 116 issue 4), dedicated to the Soviet Centenary. The issue was published last October, but just became available online. Please find the article abstract below: Continue reading →

What is a Chinese woman artist

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Source: WAGIC (nd)
Podcast 1: What is a ‘Chinese woman artist’?

In WAGIC’s very first podcast, hosts Tessa Qiu and Yuan Ren are joined by researchers Dr Monica Merlin (Birmingham School of Art), Luise Guest (White Rabbit Collection), Christina Yuen Zi Chung (University of Washington) and artist Yi Dai to respond to the questions: What is a ‘Chinese woman artist’? And is there such a thing as ‘Chinese women’s art’?

Further reading: No name group, Nuxing zhuyi/Nuquan zhuyi, Central Academy Fine Art Beijing (CAFA), Bloomberg new contemporaries, Liao Wen, Birmingham School of Art, White Rabbit Collection, Pan Yuliang: A Journey to Silence exhibition at Guangdong Times Museum, guigehua (chamber painting)​

Find out more about the artists: He Chengyao, Chen Lingyang, Lin Tianmiao, Tracey Emin,Judy Chicago, Gao Rong, Tao Amin, Dong Yuan, Xu Bing, Lu Yang

(Image: Courtesy of artist Lin Tianmiao, Badges, installation shot, 2011–2012)

Ai Weiwei on art, activisim, and human rights

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Source: The China Story (1/15/18)
Ai Weiwei on Art, Activism and Human Rights
An Interview with Ai Weiwei by Zeng Jinyan
[Translated by Gloria Davies]

Human Flow by Ai Weiwei

Source: http://www.humanflow.com/

Ai Weiwei 艾未未 is renowned for making strong aesthetic statements that resonate with timely phenomena across today’s geopolitical world. From architecture to installations, social media to documentaries, Ai uses a wide range of mediums as expressions of new ways for his audiences to examine society and its values. Recent exhibitions include: Inoculation at Fundacion Proa in Buenos Aires, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors with the Public Art Fund in New York City, Ai Weiwei on Porcelain at the Sakip Sabanci Museum in Istanbul, Ai Weiwei: Trace at Hirshhorn at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., Maybe, Maybe Not at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Law of the Journeyat the National Gallery in Prague, and Ai Weiwei. Libero at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. Continue reading →