In 1975, near the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, artist Xu Bing relocated to the countryside for two years. The 1987-8 woodcuts in MoMA’s collection reflect this pastoral atmosphere while anticipating the artist’s later turn to Conceptual art. The set of woodcuts by Xu Bing (Chinese, born 1955) in MoMA’s collection depicts rural…
MoMA PS1 Associate Curator Jenny Schlenzka on the Taiwanese artist’s innovative posters documenting some of his extreme performances in New York City in the 1980s. The four posters in the collection of MoMA’s Library are part of One Year Performance 1981–1982 by Tehching Hsieh (Taiwanese, born 1950). To complete this work, which is often referred to as Outdoor…
“A Conversation with Yang Jiechang” is available in Chinese and English. Yang talks about his “art education” during the Cultural Revolution, when he served as a Red Guard in a small village, and describes how the study of calligraphy extinguished his enthusiasm for revolution and political propaganda. Read the English translation here. 巴黎楊詰蒼工作室 24 June 2014…
For the artist Yang Jiechang (b. 1956, Foshan), there is a certain similarity betweencontemporary artists and China’s Red Guards of the 1970s: namely, their performance of arbitrary tasks. In this conversation, Yang talks about his “art education” during the Cultural Revolution, when he served as a Red Guard in a small village, and describes how…
Yu Youhan (b. Shanghai, 1943) is widely considered the father of abstract painting and Political Pop in China. A longtime teacher of art in Shanghai, Yu has no wish to pursue an interdisciplinary or international practice, as many artists of his generation do. In this conversation, he talks about his life during the Cultural Revolution…
Read the english translation here.
Read the english translation here.
The name Ding Yi is associated with the cross, a symbol the artist, designer, and educator has used since the late 1980s in his investigation of abstraction. Ding’s allover painting fields are built from the manual, systematic repetition of horizontal and vertical strokes across a flat, canvas surface. Ding grew up during the Cultural Revolution,…
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…
We live in a world of unedited images. Pictures are present in our most private chambers and on the most public social-media platforms. Photography is without question the lingua franca of our time, even if the nature and ubiquity of photographs have been marked by a turn toward digital means of capturing and storing images.…
Chen Zhen’s death in 2000 did not stop his art from living on, thanks to the hard work of Xu Min—Chen Zhen’s widow, who continues to organize his solo shows and also to restore his artworks. Xu was trained as an artist in Shanghai, but she has dedicated herself to supporting Chen’s art since the couple…
In this segment of the theme “Global Conceptualism Reconsidered,” the curators of the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s reflect upon their experiences organizing the exhibition. They address in the following interviews the origins of the exhibition’s concept, the challenges faced in defining and presenting the variety of conceptualisms across the exhibition’s many international subsections, and…
