Editor’s Note

Yishu 79 opens with features on two artists, Lee Kit and Zhou Bin, whose work reflects idiosyncratic approaches and eludes easy labels. Both artists do, however, explore aspects of the everyday and have an interest in the crossover between art and life. Godfre Leung points out how Lee Kit has been preoccupied with domestic spaces and the personal, even poetic, rituals we carry out within them, but he also recognizes that a discreet critique of global capitalism is embedded in his work. Sophia Kidd and Alice Schmatzberger survey an ambitious performance project by Zhou Bin, who engages public spaces as his stage for often spontaneous events, each of which is delivered once a day over a one-year period, emphasizing that creativity can be a central component of daily life.

We are also presenting reviews of two mainland Chinese biennials. One is among the oldest— the 11th Shanghai Biennale reviewed by Julie Chun—and the other is the newest—the Yinchuan Biennale reviewed by Romain Maitra. Both exhibitions employ literary references as inspiration for their concepts, and each was coincidentally realized under the curatorial leadership of artists/curators from India. This may indicate an effort by the Chinese cultural community to develop closer ties with their neighbours in Asia rather than the customary recourse of turning to the West.

Stephanie Bailey visits the most recent exhibition at the Guggenheim New York featuring artists from Greater China, Tales of Our Time, and discusses the ways these artists express a sense of place, while they simultaneously question the idea of any definitive representation of China. Inga Walton assesses an ambitious, large-scale photography exhibition organized by the Shanghai Centre of Photography that tracks a history of photography in China and introduces us to the breadth of image making before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution. We conclude with a book review by Linda Jean Pittwood that examines the evolution of feminism in China in the 1980s and 1990s,the issue of translation from the West to East, and how that has affected the development of feminism within China itself.

Image (top): Tita Salina, S.O.S., 2016, performance video. Courtesy of the artist.

Keith Wallace