Editor’s Note
In Yishu 89, Maya Kóvskaya explored the work of Xu Bing and its relationship to language, in particular the visuality that is inherent to calligraphy. He is not the only Chinese artist who incorporates language into visual art. Yuling Zhong’s essay in Yishu 90 examines the work of five contemporary artists and how they integrate words and characters into various artistic forms to create hybrid models and to expand their potential meaning.
Rebecca Catching takes an extensive look at the work of Chen Hangfeng, an artist who during the past two decades has in a variety of ways tackled his own, and society’s, complex transition in China from the end of the Cultural Revolution to an opening up to rampant capitalist tendencies. While he recognizes serious implications within this important period of history, arising from both within and outside of China, his work is not immune to humour.
Yishu 90 also includes several conversational texts. David Ho Yeung Chan speaks with Morgan Wong about his time-based investigations into elements of temporality and their impact on our experience of life, world events, and science. Tansy Xiao converses with Cai Dongdong about his journey through the medium of photography, its metaphor as a kind of weapon, and his eventual abandonment of it and a turn to appropriating images and everyday objects into his projects. John Tancock carries out an in-depth discussion with Wu Jian’an about the importance of art to society and his defense of sustaining Chinese mythologies and traditional artisanal practices within the context of contemporary art.
Yang Tiange’s interview with Liu Ding explores the artist/curator’s curatorial practice and distinct approach to exhibition design, a topic that has been discussed in past issues of Yishu. Here, Liu Ding explains his strategies in presenting an artist’s work that speaks to a more expansive life and creative experience than expressing a practical linear narrative.
Exemplifying another creative approach to curating and exhibition presentation, Mostafa Heddaya looks at the curatorial premises of a 2017 survey exhibition featuring the work of Xing Danwen. In it Heddaya identifies curator Tarek Abou El Fetouh’s approach to representing her work, which draws upon the writing of Jean Genet, and then ventures into ideas of what Heddaya refers to as a quality of “dissociative sociability” and “mirror effects” that are consistent elements embedded within her twenty-five year career.
Image (top): Charwei Tsai, Iris Mantra, 2005, photograph. © Charwei Tsai. Courtesy of the artist.
Keith Wallace
