Editor’s Note
Over the turn of the twenty-first century, the movement of migrant workers from rural areas to urban ones in mainland China took place on a scale unmatched anywhere else on earth. That this subject has made its way into China’s visual art is addressed by Wu Hung and Madeline Eschenburg in Yishu 80. Like migrant workers, many artists moved from villages and towns to settle in the larger urban centres, especially Beijing. Wu Hung explores the past two decades of work by Zhang Dali and his continuing recognition of the contribution of migrant workers to society, while Eschenburg turns her attention to performance art and how artists have engaged migrant workers to participate in their projects.
Another subject taken up by Yishu 80 is that of ongoing historical documentation in visual art. This approach of ensuring acknowledgment of the past in the present has received increasing attention in recent years. Liang Shang-Huei’s essay about the more than thirty years of Chen Chieh-jen’s art production and Phoebe Wong’s essay on the fifty years since the Hong Kong riots of 1967 provide a segue into Yishu 81, guest edited by Mia Yu, which focuses entirely on the importance of archival strategies in contemporary visual art.
Lu Mingjun offers us an extensive examination of the work of Zhang Hui, who has been working for more than thirty years, and demonstrates how, having initially come from a background in theatre, the artist’s exploration of painting remains conceptually connected to the idea of theatre. Finally, Yang Yeung provides reflective speculation on two artists, Enoch Cheng and Man Mei-to, who, through their engagement with an exhibition space that is marginal and non-commercial, have come to question their artistic practices and what it means to make art in an urban environment and outside of the accepted realm of the art system.
Image (top): Zhang Hui, Miraculous Slope Analysis No. 2 (details), 2008, oil on canvas, 210 x 320 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Long March Space, Beijing.
Keith Wallace
