The Vancouver Art Gallery is proud to announce the establishment of the inaugural international Asian Art Council to advise and guide the activities of the Institute of Asian Art (IAA), the Gallery’s comprehensive initiative to advance scholarship and public appreciation of art from Asia through exhibitions, public programs and collection acquisition. The Asian Art Council includes the following members: Xu Bing, Artist, Beijing; David Chau, Collector, Shanghai; Vishakha Desai, Special Advisor for Global Affairs, Professor of Professional Practice in the Faculty of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, New York; Roobina Karode, Director/Chief Curator of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi; Kimsooja, Artist, New York/Seoul; Lin Li, Collector, Hangzhou and Fumio Nanjo, Director of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

The Gallery also appointments two key positions to the IAA. Zheng Shengtian, esteemed Chinese scholar, curator and artist, takes on the position of Adjunct Director for the Institute, and Diana Freundl is named Associate Curator, Asian Art, working as the Gallery’s first curator with a focus on this field.

Led by the Gallery’s Director Kathleen Bartels and Chief Curator/Associate Director Daina Augaitis, IAA was launched in fall 2014 with two major inaugural exhibitions of Chinese art: The Forbidden City: Inside the Court of China’s Emperors and Unscrolled: Reframing Tradition in Chinese Contemporary Art. In summer 2015, the Gallery presented Mumbai-based artist Reena Saini Kallat’s installation at the Gallery’s Offsite public art space. IAA’s programs will continue to evolve with exhibitions featuring the work of renowned Korean artist Lee Bul this fall and New Delhi-based Bharti Kher in the summer of 2016.

“We are thrilled to have this distinguished group represented in our inaugural Asian Art Council as part of our Institute of Asian Art, and we are grateful to them for agreeing to provide their invaluable guidance,” said Kathleen Bartels, Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. “It is an honour to have Zheng Shengtian spearheading the Institute, and I would like to express our gratitude for his advice and enthusiasm that has provided tremendous support for the Gallery’s Asian art projects over the years. With Diana Freundl’s curatorial expertise and vision, we look forward with great excitement to the fulfillment of the goals and aspirations of this significant initiative.”

Prior to moving to Vancouver in 1990, Zheng Shengtian worked at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, as Professor and Department Chair for more than thirty years. He is the co-founder of the Chinese Canadian Artists Federation and Centre A (Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art). He is a former trustee of Centre A and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Currently Zheng is Managing Editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and Senior Curator for the Vancouver Biennale. He has organized and curated numerous exhibitions, including Jiangnan–Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art Exhibitions (Vancouver, 1998, co-curated with Hank Bull), The Art of Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Vancouver, Toronto, Winnipeg, 2002), Shanghai Modern (Munich, Kiel, 2004), Shanghai Biennale (Shanghai, 2004), China Trade (Vancouver, 2006), Reincarnation (Toronto, 2007), Art and China’s Revolution (New York, 2008), and Yellow Signal: New Media Art in China (Vancouver, 2012). He is a frequent contributor to periodicals and catalogues about contemporary Chinese and Asian art. Four volumes of his writing on art were published by the China Academy of Art Press in 2013. As an artist, Zheng has shown work in China, the United States, Canada and Russia since the 1960s. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2013.

“I am honoured to be the Adjunct Director for the Institute of Asian Art. I respect and commend Director Kathleen Bartels and the Gallery’s Board of Trustees for their vision and determination to realize this important initiative,” said Zheng Shengtian. “The Vancouver Art Gallery is the first museum in North America to hold solo shows for twentieth-century Chinese masters like Li Kuchan, Chang Dai-chien and Pan Tianshou since the 1980s. It is also one the most active Western institutions to collaborate and showcase internationally renowned contemporary Asian artists such as Kimsooja, Huang Yongping, Michael Lin, Lee Bul, Song Dong, Zhang Huan, Yang Fudong and many others. I look forward to working to further enhance the programs.”

Diana Freundl joined the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2013, during which time she has curated a series of installations for Offsite, the Gallery’s public art project, including works by Shanghai-based collective MadeIn Company and Mumbai-based Reena Saini Kallat. In 2014, she co-curated Unscrolled: Reframing Tradition in Chinese Contemporary Art, one of the inaugural exhibitions for the Institute of Asian Art. Previously, she had lived in Asian for 14 years. She was curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Shanghai, where she co-curated large-scale exhibitions such as Night on Earth: Helsinki, Berlin, Shanghai (2007); MoCA Envisage II: Butterfly Dream (2008) and INDIA XIANZAI: Contemporary Art from India (2009). In 2012, she co-curated Virtual Voices: Approaching Social Media and Art from China with Zheng Shengtian at the Charles H. Scott Gallery in Vancouver, Canada as part of Yellow Signal, a city-wide festival of new media art from China.

About the Vancouver Art Gallery

Founded in 1931, the Vancouver Art Gallery is recognized as one of the most respected and innovative visual arts institutions in Canada and is committed to strengthening ties between artists and diverse communities throughout the city, province and beyond. As the largest public art museum in Western Canada, the Gallery features the work of ground-breaking contemporary artists from around the world and presents historical art of international significance. It is committed to exploring the art of Asia, and provides a global platform for British Columbia’s dynamic artistic community, including the work of First Nations artists. Its growing collection represents the most comprehensive resource for art in British Columbia and is the principal repository for visual art produced in the region, as well as related works by other notable Canadian and international artists. The Gallery also places an emphasis on advancing scholarship through major publications and presents a multitude of public programs that offer new ways to consider art for visitors throughout the region and internationally.

Following an in-depth master planning process conducted in response to significant growth in the collection, exhibitions and attendance, the Gallery unveiled in September 2015 Herzog & de Meuron’s conceptual design for a new and expanded home in downtown Vancouver. At twice the size of the Gallery’s current space, the future facility will be a vital catalyst in enhancing Vancouver’s cultural community and will serve as a centre for cross-cultural dialogue and exchange in the visual arts.

The Vancouver Art Gallery is a not-for-profit organization supported by its members, individual donors, corporate funders, foundations, the City of Vancouver, the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Images: The new Vancouver Art Gallery designed by Herzog & de Meuron, an internationally acclaimed architectural firm based in Switzerland. Its lobby will include a library and the brand new Institute of Asian Art. Courtesy of Vancouver Art Gallery.

Editor’s Note

Yishu 71 presents the work of a diversity of artists, yet two central themes have made themselves evident in this issue—first, aesthetics and ideas that navigate between the East and West, and, second, the relationship between the traditional and the contemporary in visual art. The first is exemplified by featured artists who were raised in mainland China—Zheng Chongbin, Wei Jia, and Zhang Hongtu—and who have either lived or spent extended periods of time in the US, enabling them to fuse considerations developed in the West with those from the East in their artwork. Huang Rui, a seminal player in the evolution of contemporary art in China, has, since early in his career, employed a vast number of Western styles in his work without relinquishing concepts embedded in Chinese thought. David Diao, on the other hand, has spent most of his life in the US and appropriates New York school–style painting to explore his family’s home in China before they took flight to the West when he was a youth. What emerges is how the hybridity of integrating two cultures might affect our assumptions about how to interpret these artists’ works.

With respect to the traditional and the contemporary, Bingyi, Zheng Chongbin, Wei Jia, and Ma Yanling each reference the tradition of ink painting but have taken it far beyond its governing rules through their innovative approaches. Bingyi creates large, complex installations with ink on paper, Zheng Chongbin brings ink painting into the realm of video, Wei Jia incorporates collage using torn pieces of xuan paper, and Ma Yanling uses ink painting brushes to create finely cross-hatched images representing women film celebrities from 1930s Shanghai. Liang Kegang is an artist who has taken on curatorial projects, and while his focus is not on ink painting, he has embarked on a search to find contemporary expressions in art that acknowledge traditional Chinese philosophical and aesthetic thought.

We close Yishu 71 with a conversation between Anthony Yung and artist Sun Yuan, which brings to light another instance in which artists are participating in the conceptualization and organization of an exhibition. Sun Yuan leaves us with provocative thoughts on what it means to be an artist and how the presentation of art can challenge traditional institutional norms within an overpowering art industry.

Keith Wallace

Image (top): Bingyi, Epoché, 2014, artist with canvas on ground. © Bingyi. Courtesy of the artist.

As part of the Yishu Initiative, we have been donating a complete set of Yishu back issues (2002-2015) to libraries of major universities and art schools around the world. Our goal is to provide a valuable resource to library users who are interested in contemporary Chinese art. We thank our sponsors for their generous support.

On October 25, 2015, after the open dialogue titled “The Turning Point of Art Criticism,” which took place at CCAA Cube, Beijing, Yishu Managing Editor Zheng Shengtian donated a whole set of Yishu back issues to CCAA archive. Uli Sigg, Founder of CCAA, received the gift set.

About CCAA:

The Chinese Contemporary Art Awards were founded by Uli Sigg in 1997 as a nonprofit entity to enhance the position of Chinese contemporary art both domestically and internationally. With the growth of the art market in the ensuing decade, the purpose of the awards has shifted to emphasize a critical position on the conversation over what constitutes meaningful art in current Chinese production. In the words of Uli Sigg, “The market is today the dominant force to validate artworks. To balance and enrich this debate, an institution such as the CCAA plays an important role.” The awards offer a platform for artists to become recognized on the world stage and allow foreign curators to identify some of the most interesting art in greater China.

For information about CCAA, please visit: http://www.ccaachina.org/single

On October 26, 2015, Yishu Managing Editor Zheng Shengtian was invited to take part in the selection process of the 2015 CCAA Chinese Contemporary Art Critic Award as well as an academic seminar that took place at the auditorium of CAFA Art Museum, Beijing.

The jury comprised renowned critics or curators active in the forefront of contemporary art, including Liu Li Anna, Director of CCAA, Mark Rappolt, Editor-in-Chief of ArtReview and Art Review Asia, Pi Li, Senior Curator of Hong Kong M+ Visual Culture Museum and Art Critic, Uli Sigg, Founder of CCAA and collector, and Zheng Shengtian, Managing Editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.

This year’s CCAA Critic Award was granted to Yu Miao for her book proposal “From the Street to the White Cube, and Away again: Artists’ Intervention Practice in the System of Circulation in Chinese Contemporary Art.”

To read more about jury statements and Yu Miao’s book proposal, please visit: http://en.cafa.com.cn/ccaa-announced-that-yu-miao-was-awarded-the-2015-critic-award-intervention-of-contemporary-art-research-from-the-perspective-of-circulation.html

For information about CCAA, please visit: http://www.ccaachina.org/single

Image: CCAA Chinese Contemporary Art Critic Award press conference. Courtesy of CAFA ( Central Academy of Fine Arts) Art Info.

Yishu Managing Editor Zheng Shengtian is going to present a lecture titled, “Diego Ribera from Guanajuato,” at the SFU Harbour Centre, HC 7000, on September 8 at 7PM. The lecture focuses on the roots of Diego Rivera and his influence on Chinese Art.

Bio: Zheng Shengtian, an artist, scholar, and independent curator, has lived and worked in Vancouver since 1990. Before his immigration, Zheng worked at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, as Professor and Department Chair for more than thirty years. He is the co-founder of the Chinese Canadian Artists Federation and Centre A, Vancouver. Currently Zheng is Managing Editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, a trustee of Vancouver Art Gallery, and Senior Curator for the Vancouver Biennale. He has curated numerous exhibitions, including the 4th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai Modern, Munich (2004–05), and Art and China’s Revolution, New York (2008). He is a frequent contributor to periodicals and catalogues about contemporary Chinese and Asian art. Four volumes of his writing on art were published by the China Academy of Art Press in 2013. As an artist, Zheng has shown work in China, the United States, Canada, and Russia since the 1960s. Zheng received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2013.

Date: September 8, 2015, 7pm (Free Event)

Venue: SFU Harbour Centre

515 W Hastings St – Room 7000 H

Vancouver, BC V6B 5K3 Canada

Editor’s Note

Chinese film and video are not frequently featured in the context of visual art exhibitions. Yishu 70 presents two texts that examine the presentation of these mediums within the exhibition format. Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker discusses the Chinese Pavilion, designed by Rem Koolhaas, at the 2015 Venice Biennale, which for the most part included seasoned filmmakers, musicians, and dancers whose work focuses on the public realm and the engagement of all sectors of society in the formation of culture. Julie Chun presents an in-depth examination of Cinematheque, an exhibition of the work of Chen Wei and Cheng Ran, two artists whose interests resonate with the disquietudes of a younger generation.

Taliesin Thomas offers an insightful consideration of Chinese women artists whose work reflects a feminist position and that exemplifies aspects of Western feminist discourse while unveiling specificities that are characteristic of a Chinese social and political psyche. Zheng Shengtian, in his interview with Paz Venturelli Baraona, elaborates upon his research into the extensive engagement of Latin American artists, in this case Chilean artist José Venturelli, with Chinese culture and its government officials during the 1950s to the 1980s, contesting assumptions that Socialist Realism was all that was evident at the time.

The final four texts offer differing perspectives on the role of painting within contemporary art. Jonathan Goodman writes about Mao Yan and his commitment to a tradition of painting that in its figurative and academic roots straddles the artistic histories of both the West and the East. Danielle Shang’s essay on Qiu Xiaofei highlights a shift in the artist’s work that is the result of his persistent questioning of the relevance of painting today. Chia Chi Jason Wang pays homage to an artist who has been working for thirty years and traces the incremental shifts that have brought his painting into a dialogue with influences that include the San Francisco’s Bay Area Figurative Movement and the tradition of ink painting. Tianmo Zhang looks at an exhibition, Unscrolled, that also addresses ink painting but from a perspective that acknowledges its tradition while taking it into bold new contemporary realms.

Keith Wallace

Image (top): Wu Wenguang, China Village Documentary Project, 2005–06/2015, installation view, Chinese Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015. Courtesy of Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation.

Editor’s Note

In contexts where history-making is of the moment and not a self-conscious act anticipating the future, its documentation is often ephemeral, or even nonexistent. Yishu 69 opens with a review of an exhibition and book, as well as a conversation, revolving around an ongoing project by Biljana Ciric seeking inventive ways to bring alive and make visible the history of contemporary art in Shanghai, where, beyond individual memories, a scarcity of material is available.

Voon Pow Bartlett looks at history from a different perspective in her discussion of an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery that examined the evolution of the “black square” in abstract art; she explores the perplexing inclusion of two artists from mainland China, Zhao Yao and Liu Wei, relative to the larger premise of the exhibition. The studio practice of one of those artists, Liu Wei, is the subject of Danielle Shang’s text, which looks more deeply into how his art reflects urban change as well as his employment of migrant workers in the fabrication of his work, a subject often overlooked when considering the trajectory of an artwork within the overall art system.

Huang Yongping and Xiaojing Yan exemplify two different generations representing the Chinese diasporic experience, and the interviews with them, one by Yu Hsiao Hwei and the other by Matthew Ryan Smith, bring to light the particularities each has faced with respect to when they emigrated, where they adopted their new home, and how their artwork has been affected.

In conclusion, Xu Bing and Yangjiang Group challenge the tradition of calligraphy and bring its discourse and practice into a contemporary context. As Chanda Laine Carey argues, Xu Bing has worked for many years to expand our understanding of linguistics through disrupting the tenets of Chinese calligraphy and bringing it into a more expansive discursive field. Lisa Catt demonstrates how Yangjiang Group subverts the formal principles of Chinese rituals such as tea serving and calligraphy and inserts them into everyday situations that are, in the case of Sydney, Australia, far from their origin.

Keith Wallace

Image (top): Yangjiang Group, FINALDAYS, 2015, commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary AsianArt, Sydney. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy of the artists and Vitamin CreativeSpace, Guangzhou.

It was delightful seeing our friends and readers at Art Basel Switzerland. Many thanks for your support, and we look forward to seeing you again next year!

Yishu is pleased to announce its continued participation in the 46th edition of Art Basel Switzerland, which opens from June 18-21, 2015. Please come visit us at the Media Section Z7. We would be delighted to see you there!

ABOUT ART BASEL

The world’s premier international art show for Modern and contemporary works, Art Basel features nearly 300 leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. The exhibition includes the highest-quality paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, photographs, video and editioned works.

Open to Public: June 18-21, 2015

Venue: Halls 1 and 2 of Messe Basel,

Messeplatz, 4005 Basel, Switzerland

http://www.artbasel.com

Yishu 68 is devoted to a meeting of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council that was held in Bangkok, Thailand from September 24 to 28, 2014. This is not the first time we have covered a meeting of this group. We also presented its discussions in 2008 (May/June, July/August, September/October) and in 2010 (March/April, May June).

Each time this group meets, with a shifting cast of characters, it covers a number of areas that provide the Guggenheim Museum with a forum for discussion of how to consider the development and evolution of their programming with respect to Asian art. This is, in a sense, an innovative and even provocative way to begin a process of thinking about exhibition making—to pose questions that open up discussion and debate that can in turn serve as a barometer of contemporary issues, art-related and otherwise, derived from a diversity of points of view.

The discussions featured in Yishu 68 focus primarily on the context of China—”China and the World,” “The 1955 Bandung Conference: Alternative Postwar Histories,” and “Decentering China”—but in a broader context that also weaves in the geopolitical realms of Thailand, Indonesia, India, and Japan, among others, and thus provides new ways of considering China within a global context. This kind of discussion, often frank in content, is important in breaking down monolithic assumptions about what contemporary art is in China and simultaneously makes room for new or dormant narratives that have tended to be overlooked in constructions of contemporary history.

I would like to thank Alexandra Munroe, the Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art, and Senior Advisor, Gobal Arts, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, for collaborating with Yishu on this special issue of the journal, and Xiaorui Zhu, who has been a liaison between Yishu and the Guggenheim Museum concerning the logistical aspects of this publication. Also, thanks are extended to all the participants in the conference for their contributions to this stimulating discussion.

Keith Wallace

Image (top): Sign at the border between Hong Kong and mainland China, 1970s. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.