Editor’s Note
Yishu 86 is honoured to present essays by Mia yu and Wang Nanming, recipients of the Seventh yishu awards for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese art. These awards represent Yishu’s endeavour to celebrate and support an activity that all too often receives little recognition. Mia yu has contributed an essay about artists who, since the 1940s, have found Northwest China an inspiration for their art, and how that region has been defined within an artistic imaginary. Wang Nanming provides a statement about his particular approach to the evolution of institutional critique and how art can move outside of the institution and secure a place within the real lives of its publics.
These are followed by three texts that address painting. Marta Blàvia has written an extensive survey focusing on the role of painting in Cai Guo-Qiang’s oeuvre, from his very first works of the 1980s to his recent highly coloured works produced for the Prado Museum, Madrid. Britta Erickson, in acknowledgment of the legacy of painter Li Huasheng, has presented a survey of this important artist’s evolution with ink and brush technique; she discusses how he elevated this genre from its origins in landscape to one characterized by contemplative grids. John McDonald examines the painting of Li Huayi, an artist of the same generation as Li Huasheng who has also contributed to the tradition of ink and brush landscape painting but whose work is more unsettling in its impact.
Photographer Taca Sui makes indirect reference to literati painting, and Daniel M. Greenberg discusses how his images become an exploratory journey into historical places of the past but in ways that are suggestive and elusive rather than literal. Tansy Xiao speaks with artist Lin yan, who works extensively with xuan paper and brings to it new dimensions, especially by creating installations and adapting it to the architectural spaces in which the work is presented.
Godfre Leung explores two performances in Vancouver by members of the collective Hong Kong Exile that employ technology to speak of the diasporic condition within two very different narrative contexts. Our final text, by Stephanie Bailey, offers a detailed examination of the Guggenheim New York’s massive survey of Chinese art after 1989, in which she discusses the curatorial concept and its presentation to a Western, in this case american, audience.
Image (top): Taca Sui, Shicong (detail), 2015, archival pigment print on baryta paper, 53 x 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art, New York.
Keith Wallace
