Art

posts related to Chinese art

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 →

Shangyuan Art Museum: A Demolition

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Last week the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published my text about the demolition of Beijing Shangyuan Art Museum in June. It is available online, maybe for free by the time you read this. I have assembled screenshots with some commentary in English on my blog (https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/08/20/shangyuan-art-museum-in-the-faz/). What follows is the English version. Please email me if you have any questions. Thank you!

Best,

Martin Winter 维马丁 <dujuan99@gmail.com>

Shangyuan Art Museum. A Demolition.
Martin Winter

How can I write about it? Write down what I know. In detail. How did it start. On June 3rd suddenly there were people measuring buildings. Three or four people. Then one of us artists asked them what they were doing. These houses will be demolished. What? Yes, all of these. Our studios. Why? It’s all illegal. We are just measuring, they sent us. Who? The village committee. And those above. On June 4th too, other people. Where is Cheng Xiaobei? Does she know? She is coming to Beijing. Next week. She is the boss. One of the founders of Shangyuan Art Museum and the only person around willing to take charge, able to negotiate and decide.

I am one of the artists. Every year they invite artists to live and work there. Over thirty, sometimes 40 people. From early April to late October, sometimes late March till early November. Trees bloom in March, some bloom in February. But there’s no heating. Each year water is freezing somewhere in the walls. Doors and windows are not made for winter. The one really solid building, the big exhibition hall, is now gone. Continue reading Shangyuan Art Museum: A Demolition →

Liao Bingxiong’s ‘Slippery Poem-Pictures’

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Source: Associaton for Chinese Animation Studies (7/13/24)
A Parting Shot: Liao Bingxiong’s “Slippery Poem-Pictures” and the 1957 Rectification Movement
By John A. Crespi

The Hundred Flowers Movement, launched in May 1956 and culminating in Mao Zedong’s call to critique the Chinese Communist Party during the Rectification Movement of May and June 1957, was a bonanza for China’s manhua. During that span of about a year, China’s cartoonists were granted free rein to take aim at the favorite target of satirists everywhere: their own ruling regime.

Or so it seemed. Today, of course, we know that the Rectification Movement ended abruptly with the Anti-rightist Movement, when Mao cut off the flood of criticism he had himself summoned by persecuting untold thousands of intellectuals. How far did China’s manhua artists push the boundaries of critique when responding to the call to “rectify” the party? It is hazardous to generalize; an extensive study of manhua through this period is waiting to be undertaken. Here I offer a brief look at just one prominent example of a manhua caught in the ideological crossfire: Cantonese artist Liao Bingxiong’s 廖冰兄 (1915-2006) “Slippery Poem-Pictures” (dayou cihua 打油词话), published on page 5 of China’s leading satirical art magazine, Manhua Semi-monthly (Manhua banyue kan 漫画半月刊), on July 8, 1957.[1]

Continue reading Liao Bingxiong’s ‘Slippery Poem-Pictures’ →

The Conformed Body book launch

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Book Launch: The Conformed Body: Contemporary Art in China

The book launch for Professor Jiang Jiehong’s The Conformed Body: Contemporary Art in China, published by Brill, will include a presentation by Professor Jiang Jiehong (Birmingham City University), remarks by Professor Chris Berry (King’s College London) and Dr Wenny Teo (The Courtauld Institute of Art), and a panel conversation moderated by Dr Panpan Yang (SOAS University of London).

Sample books will also be available.

The event is part of SOAS East Asian Research Seminar (EARS). It is free and open to all. But booking is essential. The event is in-person only.

Time
Monday, July 8, 5 – 6:40pm London Time

Location
The event will take place at Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre (BGLT) within the SOAS Brunei Gallery.
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1B 5DQ

About the new book
Through the perspective of the ‘conformed body’, this groundbreaking book examines the role in art of everyday conformist practices in the People’s Republic of China, such as mass assemblies and bodily trainings and exercises, as well as their impact on people’s perceptions and collective memories. It identifies related artworks, reassesses artistic interpretations with critical reflections, and explores a key origin of artistic productions in post-Mao China. Featuring 200 colour illustrations, the book discusses works by more than 30 internationally acclaimed Chinese contemporary artists, including Ai Weiwei, Geng Jianyi, Song Dong, Xu Bing, Zhang Peili and Zhang Xiaogang.

Register/More info
https://bit.ly/3QZVxgW

We look forward to seeing you.

Panpan Yang <py6@soas.ac.uk>

Who is Hua Mulan?

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Source: Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton (6/10/24)
Who is Hua Mulan?
By

So you think you know who Mulan is? Perhaps you know the feisty girl from the eponymous cross-dressing warrior of the 1998 Disney animated film Mulan. She is the rebellious teenager who escapes the suffocating social expectations for a maiden and heads to the battle zone, where she finds peace with who she is. Or, if you are a Chinese speaker, you may have first learned about the weaver-turned-soldier from the “Ballad of Mulan,” the lyrics of a folk song first preserved in writing in as early as the sixth century. In the memorable rhyming text she is the filial and brave daughter who is determined to shield her aging father from a perilous military life.

Mulan’s story is included in an advertisement booklet titled Women’s Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars in Color Pictures 女子二十四孝彩圖, published by a pharmaceutical company in Shanghai in 1941. Whereas the historic figures featured in the classic Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars were nearly all male, the booklet focuses on young Chinese girls’ and women’s filial piety. The caption emphasizes that when Mulan returns home after serving eleven years in the army, she is “apparently still a virgin” (page 7). The facing page advertises fish liver oil, said to have ingredients supplied by an American vitamin company. In Nü zi er shi si xiao cai tu. Shanghai: Xin Yi Pharmaceutical Company, 1941. (Cotsen 75832)

China’s Bravest Girl: The Legend of Hua Mu Lan, told by Charlie Chin 陳建文; illustrated by Tomie Arai 新居富枝; Chinese translation by Wang Xing Chu 王性初. Emeryville, CA: Children’s Book Press, 1993. (Cotsen 17732)

Have you ever wondered, however, what kind of Chinese girl Mulan was? Weren’t women in ancient China supposed to have their feet bound? How could Mulan have gotten away from the crippling practice? Was Mulan’s family rich or poor–and does it matter? Did Mulan really grow up in those circular communal buildings portrayed in Disney’s live-action adaptation of 2020? If not, where was her hometown? [CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE]

Shangyuan Art Museum demolition

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Below is a link to a very good documentary by Chen Jiaping 陈家坪. He climbed in to join us at the demolition site of Shangyuan Art Museum last Saturday, June 15. The local powers were paranoid that day. Invitations to a party on the ruins had been circulating. So they tried to block off exit and entry. But they could not prevent this excellent film:

https://www.xiaohongshu.com/discovery/item/66717a1d000000001c0374e2

I have been documenting the demolition with poems and photos on my WeChat. The poems can be found on the following blog posts:

SOUND 声音
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/18/sound-%e5%a3%b0%e9%9f%b3/
美 BEAUTIFUL
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/17/%e7%be%8e-beautiful/
躲 HIDING
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/16/%e8%ba%b2-hiding/
SHANGYUAN ART MUSEUM 上苑艺术馆
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/14/%e4%b8%8a%e8%8b%91%e8%89%ba%e6%9c%af%e9%a6%86-shangyuan-art-museum/
IT HAS BEGUN 开始了 DAS IST DER ANFANG
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/13/anfang-%e5%bc%80%e5%a7%8b%e4%ba%86/
DEMOLISH 拆
https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/06/04/%e6%8b%86-demolish/

Thank you for watching, reading and circulating!

Martin Winter 维马丁
in the ruins of Shangyuan Art Museum

Shangyuan Art Museum to be demolished

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They say the mayor’s office of Beijing city has made this decision to demolish the Shangyuan Art Museum. No reason given, no plan, no date. Could be tomorrow. Please tell anyone you can think of, ask anyone and ask people to ask about this. Thank you!

Martin Winter

拆

没心情写诗
反正要拆
拆艺术馆
拆工作室
拆画廊
拆图书馆
拆国际交流
二十年来
所建立的
统统都拆
没说理由
没说日期
没说计划
一直这样
今天通知
非常适合

2024.6.4

DEMOLISH

What is the opposite
of soft power?
Burning bridges?
Beijing Shangyuan Art Museum
has been a bridge
for international relations
in art and culture
for twenty years.
Yesterday and today
here at the museum
people came to measure buildings
slated for demolition.
Everything must go!
Everyone!
This hill is for goats
anyway.
No reason given,
no exact date.
Nothing new in this country.
Today’s date
fits rather well.

MW June 4th, 2024