Ma Zhensheng: Standing Firm on Production Work, 1966 The Chinese government has attempted to censor an exhibition about the Cultural Revolution opening next month at New York’s Asia Society, The Chinese government has refused to allow museums in China to lend works to what is expected to be the most significant show yet on this [...]
Does Abstract Art Exist in China?
With the Olympics in China, I thought I would include this piece that I found on Chinese abstract. Zhao Wuji’s abstract painting Abstraction is the Product of Western Modernism bsent the birth of Western Modernism, there would have been no abstract art. For a brief period during the twentieth century, however, some scholars propounded the [...]
Huang Yongping – Bat Project
Very interesting story of how art and politics can cross paths In 1986, Huang Yongping formed the Xiamen Dada group, aiming to bring Dadaist principles to Chinese art. Following his participation in the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou and the political upheavals in China of the same year, Huang moved [...]
Xu Bing
Xu Bing was born in Chongqing, China in 1955 and grew up in Beijing. In 1975 he was relocated to the countryside for two years during the Cultural Revolution. In 1977 he enrolled in the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing where he studied printmaking. He received an MFA from the Central Academy in [...]
Wang Guangyi
In the mid-1980s, Wang Guangyi espoused a humanist vision of art for post-Mao China. His series of paintings entitled “Frozen North Pole” sought to evoke, in the artist’s words, “a kind of beauty of sublime reason which contains constant, harmonious feelings of humanity.” Abstract human figures placed in orderly, grid-like arrangements face uniformly forward, as [...]
