Editor’s Note

Yishu 63 offers a mix of essays and conversations that explore the work of both established and emerging artists. Some of these artists have been discussed previously in the pages of Yishu, and the current essays provide updates or new perspectives on their work. Well-known artists He Yungchang, Ding Yi, Chen Haiyan, and Chen Shaoxiong, as different as they are from each other in focusing on issues of performance, abstraction, the fantastic, or urban development, have made significant contributions to the evolution of contemporary Chinese art during the past three decades. One condition that ties these diverse artists together here is their experience of the flood of philosophical and art historical ideas that arrived in China from the West in the 1980s and that for most were completely new and revelatory influences on their work.

In addition, this issue features a reflection on an exhibition by twelve artists who call themselves N12 and were educated together at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing during the late 1990s. While pursuing their independent careers, these artists also have been showing periodically as a group for more than a decade, and the essay featured here considers the reasons for and effectiveness of showing together in the past compared to now.

Yishu 63 also offers conversations with artists who are of a younger generation and who are exploring directions that reflect the social, political, and cultural conditions that they live within now, which are so different from those of twenty years ago. Chow Chun Fai and Nadim Abbas, both based in Hong Kong, are interested in the complexity of perception and our misconceptions or mistranslations about the origins of history or ideas. Rutherford Chang, who lives in the USA, explores everyday objects that we may take for granted and the qualities and cultural meaning that lie within them, and, like those artists from an earlier generation, he too navigates the spaces between the East and the West, but in a very different way.

Keith Wallace

image (top): Chow Chun Fai, Supper at Emmaus (detail), 2014, photo installation, 142.4 x 177.8 cm. Courtesy of the artist.