Beijing, Documentation by New Generation Artists at the Dawn of Chinese Contemporary Art.. and Others
China_Beijing
Documentation by New Generation Artists at the Dawn of Chinese Contemporary Art
Beijing’s Inside-Out Art Museum (IOAM) presents “Waves and Echoes: Zhang Qiang and Survey Sheets of Painting Groups, 1986,” an exhibition that explores the thoughts of young artists at the dawn of Chinese contemporary art.
Zhang Qiang (b. 1940) is an art historian who lived through the 1980s, the most intense period of modernization in Chinese art, and the art newspaper he published from 1985 to 1989 was at the center of the Chinese ‘New Wave Art’ movement. In 1986, he sent survey sheets to more than 178 young Chinese artists and collected their responses.
The letters he received contained artistic theories and photographs of their works. In this exhibition, they are brought together and open to the audience, vividly conveying the atmosphere of the new generation of Chinese art in the 1980s. IOAM is a private art museum in Beijing that has presented exhibitions focusing on the modernization history of Chinese art and its relationship with Western influence.
China
Wu Weishan, China’s Most Famous Statue Sculptor
At the beginning of February, a 7.8-meter-tall statue of Confucius was unveiled in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. The artist is the Chinese sculptor Wu Weishan (b. 1962), who receives commissions both from the Chinese government and international institutions.
He has created statues in public spaces in more than 30 countries worldwide. The Confucius statue in Uruguay was made to celebrate the 35th anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and Uruguay.
Wu Weishan sculpts masters of the humanities from both China and the West. In Europe he often shows two figures together, representing East and West. For example, he created statues of Socrates and Confucius in Athens, Greece, and Leonardo da Vinci and Chinese modernist painter Qi Baishi in Florence, Italy. He explains that his sculptures inherit the ‘Xieyi’ tradition of classical Chinese painting. ‘Xieyi’ paintings emphasize the artist’s intentions and feelings about the subject rather than detailed depictions and feature simple and connotative brushstrokes.
Revolutionaries of the Chinese Communist Party such as Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhou Enlai are also frequent subjects of his work. Wu Weishan, as the current director of the National Art Museum of China, also actively engages in curating.
Hong kong
Pace Gallery Hong Kong: Yin Xiuzhen Solo Exhibition “Everywhere”
Face Gallery Hong Kong presents Yin Xiuzhen’s (b. 1963) solo exhibition “Everywhere” through March 9. Yin Xiuzhen is one of China’s leading contemporary artists. The exhibition features more than 40 sculptures and installations created by the artist over the past 15 years, including her well-known installation series ‘Ripple.’
She has gained international recognition for her installations and performances using fabric, everyday found objects such as clothes, shoes, and suitcases, and changing materials such as fruit and plants. Her focus is on the rapid changes in the world’s cultures and environments, and the lives and memories of the people who inhabit them.
Recently, she has been focusing on the materiality of ceramics as it changes over time. Her new ceramic works, ‘The Surging Waves Chronicles,’ are presented for the first time in this exhibition. The surface of the new works shows bends and cracks from the pressure applied to the clay before it solidified. The artist’s characteristic scraps of old clothes are visible through the now-hardened cracks.
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