Since the 1950s, there has been an active production of experimental film, animation, and video art in Asia. Yet, much of this work has not been consistently conserved or shared with the public due to the lack of accessible archives or organized collections dedicated to its preservation and dissemination. The conference “The Archival Impulse: Collecting…
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…
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…
Tyeb Mehta once warned Atul Dodiya against referencing Francis Picabia, who is but one reference on a long and abundant list that includes Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, and surprisingly Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian—although Dodiya has never been an abstract painter. Dodiya also appropriates diverse forms and inspiration from daily life, such as…
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…
As museums move to put more geographically inclusive displays on view, a tension in emphasis–between cross-geographic correspondences and local particularities–is necessarily at stake. We convened a conversation between art historian, Alexander Alberro; curator, Doryun Chong; and museum director, Edit Sasvári, each with their own regional focus, to discuss the possibility of “the global museum,” what…
Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension), a performance collective active in the 1960s in Tokyo and Nagoya, Japan, has only recently become better known in the international art world through the following exhibitions and content: Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012–13) with screenings of the group’s performance documents; Great Crescent: Art and Agitation…
One of the most respected Czech artists in recent times, Jiří Kovanda created actions and installations in Prague’s public spaces in the mid-1970s and early ’80s. Self-taught, he was one of the few Czech action artists to work outdoors in the urban environment following the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. Most of…
Rachel Weiss, curator, writer, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was invited to MoMA to speak about the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, which she co-organized in 1999 with Jane Farver (who also came to talk on the subject), Luis Camnitzer, and an international team of curators: Okwei Enwezor,…
Jane Farver, curator and former Director of Exhibitions at the Queens Museum, was invited to MoMA to speak about the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, which she co-organized in 1999 with Rachel Weiss (who also came to present on the subject), Luis Camnitzer, and an international team of curators: Okwui Enwezor, Reiko Tomii &…
In the introduction to the 1992 Guangzhou Biennial Art Fair catalogue, the organizers of the event predicted that art in China would turn toward the market, that commercial investment would replace state sponsorship, that commercial enterprises would replace state-sponsored cultural organizations, and that a new system of legitimization and value based on academic criteria, legal…
John Cage and David Tudor visited Japan in October 1962 at the invitation of the Sogetsu Art Center (SAC). Over the course of the month they gave seven concerts in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Sapporo, causing a sensation that would become known as “the John Cage shock.”
