Peggy Wang is Assistant Professor of Art History and Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. Her research has been supported by Jacob Javits and Fulbright-Hays fellowships and centers on how meanings and histories of art have been constructed in light of cultural globalization. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Chicago. In 2010 she served as editorial associate for The Museum of Modern Art publication Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. Her recent publications include “Art Critics as Middlemen: Navigating state and market in contemporary Chinese art, 1980s–1990s,” Art Journal (Spring 2013) and “Making and remaking history: Categorizing ‘conceptual art’ in contemporary Chinese art,” Journal of Art Historiography 10 (June 2014). She is currently completing a book-length study on artists’ strategies of sociopolitical intervention in contemporary Chinese art from the 1990s onward. At Bowdoin she teaches courses on pre-modern, modern, and contemporary Asian art history.
Did 1993 mark a watershed for “contemporary Chinese art” in the then increasingly globalized art world? In this essay Peggy Wang discusses exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art held overseas in the year 1993, notably China Avant-Garde in Berlin, China’s New Art, Post-1989 in Hong Kong, and the Venice Biennale. Analyzing various readings of works by artists such as Wang…
