Top 6 research sources for contemporary Chinese art by Asian art history major

TOP BLOGS, BOOKS, NEWSPAPER SOURCES FOR CHINESE ART

What do you read? What information are you looking for? Where do you find it? These are the questions on our lips every day when we talk with art world movers. We have learnt that, despite exploding levels of activity in the art scenes across Asia, reporting remains sparse and uneven and that people have a surprisingly diverse range of sources depending on their base country and background.

In this post we ask Ashley Lee, one of our new intake of interns who  studies Asian art in the US and London, to give us her perspective. 

As a young full-time scholar based in the west, what Ashley are your favourite sources of information about Chinese contemporary art?

As an art history major specializing in contemporary Asian art, here are the list of sources that I utilize regularly in my studies to keep up with the fast-paced scene. These are my absolute favorite sources—everything that I read and recommend frequently.

e-flux – http://www.e-flux.com – A basic yet comprehensive list of new exhibitions and announcements in the art world. Its journal, which has been published online since November 2008, raises questions about contemporary art issues.

Art AsiaPacific – http://www.aapmag.com – One of my favorite periodicals: it covers the Middle East and Central Asia as well as East Asia.  AAP also has articles that describe the major successes and progressions of major Asian artists and movements, which makes it especially helpful for research—for example, in the last issue, Zhang Huan and Roberto Chabet were mentioned.

ArtRadarAsia – https://artradarasia.wordpress.com – As a student, I appreciate ArtRadarAsia for its broad range of topics covering all of the Asian art world. It’s an excellent resource for finding a paper topic or finding an overview of a movement or a specific area of Asia.

New York Times exhibition reviews – http://www.nytimes.com – The New York Times art critics often review Asian art shows in the New York area. I would especially recommend reading reviews by Holland Cotter because they contain valuable specialist information on Asian art.

Asia Art Archive – http://www.aaa.org.hk – A library of contemporary Asian art resources in Hong Kong which contains reference materials, exhibition catalogues, periodicals, pamphlets, exhibition invitations, newspaper articles, among other things. It’s comprehensive (it has over 25,000 catalogued materials), especially for East and Southeast Asia, and its catalogue is viewable online. It also has a listing of special events related to contemporary Asian art.

Wu Hung, Exhibiting Experimental Art in China: This is my favorite book about the development of contemporary Chinese art. Wu Hung, one of the foremost scholars of Chinese contemporary art, wrote this book as a catalog for Cancelled: Exhibiting Experimental Art in China, a 2000 show at Chicago’s Smart Museum. It explains the reconstruction of Song Dong‘s installation Father and Son in the Ancestral Temple, which had originally been shown in the 1998 exhibition It’s Me, which was shut down by the Chinese government. It also lists all the exhibitions that were shut down or censored in the 1990s.

AL/KCE

Related posts:
Top 5 Sites for Japanese Contemporary Art News by Matthew Larking – June 2009
Top 14 Books on Southeast Asian Art by Adeline Ooi – April 2009
Top 5 Books on Chinese art by Chinese art specialist, Pippa Dennis – October 2008

 

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UBS collecting video and global art, showing four decade survey National Art Museum Beijing to Nov 2008

CORPORATE COLLECTORS SHOW 

Moving Horizons: The UBS Art Collection 1960s to the present day, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, 29 September – 4 November 2008

 
The UBS Art Collection embodies four decades of collecting, from the 1970s to the present day. Most of the works from the 1960s-1980s were assembled for an American investment company, PaineWebber, which was acquired by UBS in 2000. These works joined the artworks that UBS had been collecting for its sites across Europe to form what is today The UBS Art Collection.

Change in collecting pattern: local to global

The Collection reflects the change in collecting from local to global, from a world in which most artists lived in the country where they were born and the art market was led by New York City, to a world in which artists migrate or divide their time between continents, and the art market has multiple centres across the globe. The Collection also reflects the change in visual arts practice from one that was prescribed by movements to one that is diverse and fluid.

1960s: pop art

This exhibition of approximately 150 works demonstrates these changes. Beginning with a large group of Pop Art prints and drawings by artists including Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Edward Ruscha, the exhibition then presents a group of prints and drawings by Minimalist artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella.

1970s: conceptual art

The 1970s ushered in a quieter conceptual aesthetic, represented in the exhibition by Vija Celmins and, although very different, Alighiero e Boetti. Here too is Chuck Close, who used a structure of grids and symbols in his multiple series of portraits.

1980s: explosion of figurate painting

Then came the explosion of highly expressive figurate painting in the 1980s. Reacting against the performance-based and ephemeral conceptual practice of the 70s, these paintings and drawings often contained personal metaphors to reflect the lives of their makers. In Italy Sandra Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and Mimmo Paladino were grouped under the banner of Transavantguardia. In Germany Neo-Expressionists such as Georg Baselitz had an influence on the younger sculptor Stephan Balkenhol, included here, and painters such as Eric Fischl, Susan Rothenberg, David Salle and Julian Schnabel received wide acclaim in the United States. The British artist Lucian Freud had consistently focused on figurative painting since the 1940s, but didn’t receive international attention until the 1980s, the decade marked by this “return to painting’. He is represented in the exhibition by both paintings and prints.

1990s: photography and YBAs

In the 1990s photography was a critical medium, used to record the physical world with apparent objectivity by artists such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Candida Höfer and Beat Streuli. The ’90s was also the decade of the much fêted ‘YBAs’, the group of young and savvy British artists represented here by Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume and one of their mentors, Michael Craig-Martin.

2000 on: global diversity, migration and video

By 2000 thriving markets were by now established across the globe – from Mexico City to Mumbai, from Berlin to Shanghai. Biennials and triennials in Brisbane, Yokohama, Istanbul, Sarjah, São Paulo and Singapore, to name a few, had shifted and expanded loci of interest, and The UBS Art Collection now hopes to mirror this diversity and expand the possibilities for displaying art in its corporate environment with the acquisition of video in particular.

Navin Rawanchaikul

The final part of the exhibition includes large-scale photo-based installations by American artist Susan Hiller and Chinese artist Xu Zhen as well as videos by Chinese artists Qiu Anxiong and Cao Fei, as well as Chen Chieh-jen from Taipeii, Navin Rawanchaikul from Thailand, Adrian Paci from Albania and Oscar Muñoz from Colombia. Their work addresses political concerns pertinent to their own experiences, but relevant across the world, issues of rapid industrialization, migration, memories of painful pasts and hopes for brighter futures.

Joanne Bernstein, Curator, The UBS Art Collection, May 2008

See (in new window)

• more news about collectors
• more news about video art
• UBS Art Collection website

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Museum show for recent discovery Chinese Canadian artist Terence Koh

FRANKFURT MUSEUM SHOW CHINESE ARTIST to 31 August 2008 In an incredibly short time, Terence Koh’s spectacular performances and experientially intensively accessible installations have made this Chinese-Canadian artist one of the most fascinating discoveries of recent years according to Asia Art Archive.

Following up his spectacular installations at the Kunsthalle Zurich, the Wiener Secession and the Whitney Museum in New York, Terence Koh installs one of his signature monochrome environments especially for the Schirn; for this exhibition, he initiates the surreal objects, ritually summoning them to life, in a secret performance.

Under the title “Captain Buddha”, visitors who set foot in the luminously flooded room are invited to accompany the artist on a journey that will take them on a search for themselves through the entire world – India, China, Burma, Belgium, Africa, Mexico and Canada are just some stations along the way – one that aims to reach nirvana and ends in nothingness.

For his installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Koh links two worlds that at first glance seem almost antipodal: Buddhism and that popular classic of world literature, Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” – the tale of the fateful quest of charismatic and supremely obsessed Captain Ahab for the Great White Whale.

For this installation, Koh himself set out on a quest: clad as a monk in a golden robe, he journeyed to fifteen places – Canada, Japan, China, Thailand, Mexico, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Israel, Iceland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Africa, and the USA – in his search for objects. In Terence Koh’s words: “I’m like the captain in Moby Dick. I’m trying to find the White Whale in the white objects, but in the end I find nothing.”

When: 28/5/2008 – 31/8/2008  
Where: Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Frankfurt  http://www.schirn.de 

Source: Asia Art Archive www.aaa.org.hk