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 [...]
Contemporary art “to connect” to China
The new US embassy in Beijing, opening in August, will include art by Jeff Koons, Cai Guo-Qiang, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Rauschenberg, and others Jason Edward Kaufman Jeff Koons is lending his sculpture Tulips, an edition of which is shown here in the courtyard of the Nord/LB bank in Hanover, Germany, to the US embassy in [...]
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 [...]
Geng Jianyi
“I used to think that a completed artwork was like the completed act of taking a piss: when it’s finished it’s finished – you don’t go carrying the contents of the chamber pot around with you. But now things are different, you can’t just take a piss whenever you like anymore and be done with [...]
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 [...]
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Opens in Beijing
The interior of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in 798 District, Dashanzi here in northeast Beijing and the exterior of the UCCA featuring a large brick chimney soaring through the building to 164 feet above the ground which is a highly visible landmark and beacon for the arts district. / Courtesy of UCCA [...]
