Editor’s Note

Yishu 83 marks our fourth collaboration with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and its Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art, and Senior Advisor, Global Arts, Alexandra Munroe. As part of these collaborations, Yishu has published presentations given by leading scholars at the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council. These meetings and discussions are an important component in the development of the Guggenheim’s Asian art programming and in opening up ideas for us all about what constitutes contemporary Asian art.

This special issue of Yishu takes a somewhat different turn in that it is publishing papers prepared by emerging scholars who were invited by the Guggenheim Museum and New York University to participate in the symposium Art and China after 1989: New Perspectives. Taking place in September 2016, it served as a prelude to the ambitious exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, which opened on October 6, 2017, and includes the work of seventy-one artists and groups.

The essays included in Yishu 83 take 1989 and its globally significant events—the China Avant-Garde exhibition, the Tian’anmen Square incidents, the transformation of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc—as a jumping off point for a vitally important period in the evolution of contemporary Chinese with respect to an international presence, the importance of localism, the introduction of new media beyond the tradition of painting, collective artistic endeavours, and an entry into the art market, developments that, among others, are explored in these essays.

Yishu would like to thank the authors for their rich array of contributions and for exploring various case studies, both well known and not, that illuminate this important period of history. We also would like to acknowledge Oriana Cacchione, Xiaorui Zhu, Ros Holmes, Wenny Teo, and Peggy Wang, who made presentations at this symposium but who have previous commitments for their texts. Finally, many thanks to Alexandra Munroe and Kyung An, Assistant Curator, Asian Art, who initiated and worked with Yishu on this special issue.

Image (top): Black Cover Book, 1994, White Cover Book, 1995, and Grey Cover Book, 1998.

Keith Wallace