Yishu Journal of Contemporary Art, in partnership with Emily Carr University, is pleased to invite you to the screening of a documentary From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng: Contemporary Chinese art in the 1980s.

The 1980s was a seminal period in the history of contemporary art in China. However, the contribution and experimentalism of the art scene in South China, particularly in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, have generally been overlooked. But due in part to the proximity of Hong Kong, western ideas from translated books and articles as well as popular culture in the form of TV shows and Canto pop, flooded over the border to Guangdong at the end of the Cultural Revolution. This influx of new ideas and popular culture sparked great excitement, debate and experimentation in the arts. Based on primary research, rare film footage and personal interviews with key artists, this documentary bears witness not only to the reading fever that gripped the Chinese art world in the 1980s. It also highlights the experimentalism and verve of artists and critics in South China whose contributions to the development of contemporary art have been long lasting and deep.

Interviewees (in alphabetical order):

Shaoxiong CHEN(陳劭雄), Tong CHEN(陳侗), Jianjin DENG(鄧箭今), Yuan FENG(馮遠), Hanru HOU(侯瀚如), Xiaopeng HUANG(黃小鵬), Zhengtian LI(李正天), Yilin LIN(林一林), Hong SHAO(邵宏), Huangsheng WANG(王璜生), Du WANG(王度), Tan XU(徐坦), Xiaoyan YANG(楊小彥), Jiechang YANG(楊詰蒼)

Produced by: Asia Art Archive (Jane DeBevoise, Claire Hsu, Phoebe Wong, Anthony Yung)

Date: Tuesday May 25, 2010, 6PM to 8:20PM
Venue: Emily Carr University, Room 301
1399 Johnston Street, Granville Island.

Schedule:

6pm | Film Screening
“From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng: Contemporary Chinese art in the 1980s.”

6:50pm | Panel Discussion
Jane DeBevoise , Chair, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong /New York (Producer of the film) & Lin Yilin, Artist, Beijing / New York Moderator: Keith Wallace, Editor-in chief, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art

7:50pm – 8:20pm
Reception, beverages and snacks

Panelists:

JANE DEBEVOISE is an independent advisor and art historian, based in Hong Kong and New York. Prior to moving to Hong Kong in 2002, Ms. DeBevoise was Deputy Director of the Guggenheim Museum, responsible for museum operations and exhibitions globally. She joined the Museum in 1996 as Project Director of China: 5000 Years, a blockbuster exhibition of traditional and modern Chinese art that was presented in 1998 at the Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao. Prior to 1996, Ms. DeBevoise was Managing Director at Bankers Trust Company where she worked for 14 years in New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo and London. Ms. DeBevoise has a BA degree from Tufts University, an MA degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD from The University of Hong Kong. Ms. DeBevoise was appointed by the Home Affairs Bureau of the Hong Kong Government to the Committee for Museums 2004-2007 and to the Museums Advisory Group for the development of the West Kowloon Cultural District 2006 – 2007. She is Chair of the Board of Directors of Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, and a Trustee of Asian Cultural Council and The China Institute in New York.

LIN YILIN is an artist who lives and works in New York and Beijing. He was born in Guangzhou, China and studied at the Sculpture Department, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts from 1983 to 1987. He was a co-founder of “Big-Tail-Elephant Group” in 1990. His recent solo exhibitions include Big Family: Brothers, Not Comrades (Arrow Factory, Beijing, 2009); Target, (Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2008); A Spatio-temporal Tunnel, (Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, 2008) and Zero Interface: Brave New World, (Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, 2007). His works were also included in the 10th Biennale de Lyon, (Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France, 2009); Documenta 12, (Kassel, Germany,2007); the 50th Venice Biennale, (Venice, Italy, 2003); Big Tail Elephant, (Kunsthalle, Bern, Switzerland, 1998); Cities on the Move, (Vereinigung bildender Kunstler Wiener Secession, Austria, 1997); China Avant-Garde, (Haus der Kulture der Welt, Berlin, Germany, 1993) and the Exhibition of Big Tail Elephant Group, (Guangzhou No.1 Worker’s Palace, Guangzhou, China, 1991).

Moderator:

KEITH WALLACE has been a curator of contemporary art since 1979. From 1991 to 2001 he was Curator, then Director/Curator, of the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, where he developed a program of regional, national, and international exhibitions. He is currently an independent curator and has organized exhibitions for the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Power Plant, Toronto; Centre A, Vancouver; and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia. In 2004 he organized InFest: International Artist Run Culture, which brought together two hundred and fifty artists and administrators from twenty five countries. Since 2004, Wallace has been Editor of Yishu.

This project is made possible by the generous support of:

The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation
W.L.S. Spencer Foundation
Ilyas and Mara Khan
Foundation for Arts Initiatives

ABOUT YISHU

Yishu has been a leading journal in the coverage of contemporary Chinese art and culture since 2002. Each bi-monthly issue presents scholarly and topical essays by the most knowledgeable writers in the field of Chinese art. Cultural commentary, featured artists, interviews, conference proceedings, and exhibition reviews provide a stimulating forum for dialogue and debate around the most important issues affecting contemporary Chinese culture and its position in the world today.

Yishu 38 opens with three texts featuring women artists who represent different generations, who come from different backgrounds, and whose work differs stylistically. Yet each artist alludes in her work to issues of gender and the social restrictions faced by women, both historically and currently, within Chinese society. In an interesting complement to these texts, Zheng Shengtian writes on Qi Zhilong, a male artist, and the disconcerting play in his work between the aesthetic and social representation of women during the Cultural Revolution and in today’s popular culture.

We also present the second of two panel discussions (the previous published in Yishu 37) from the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council meetings in June of 2009. This panel focuses on a discussion about the evolution of modernity in the context of Asia. Geeta Kapur from India, Midori Matsui from Japan, and Xu Bing from mainland China propose thoughtful and timely perspectives on how modernity is inflected in their respective nations’ cultural production and how it adopts its own identities within each context. Related to this is a growing interest in examining the history of contemporary Chinese art, especially considering a history that represents just over thirty years of activity. The summary of the conference Negotiating Difference: Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context brings forward several important issues, among them the kinds of methodologies that are employed in the analysis of contemporary Chinese art from an academic perspective as well as the practical perspective of those actively working in the field, and the challenges and benefits of both. We conclude this issue of Yishu with the second part of Paul Gladston’s examination of contemporaneity and the specifics of its manifestation in the context of China. He offers a considered deliberation on the ideas of art historian and curator Gao Minglu’s analysis of the different trajectories that exist between an Eastern conception of modernism and a Western one.

Yishu will be hosting booths at the Hong Kong International Art Fair from May 27 to 30 and at Art 41 Basel from June 16 to 20. Please come and visit us.

Keith Wallace

photo (top): Cui Xiuwen, Existential Emptiness No. 2 (detail), 2009, photograph, 78 x 500 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

In Yishu, a variety of ideas weave and resonate throughout different texts in each issue. For example, in Yishu 37 we are featuring three artists with unconnected backgrounds—Zhong Biao is from mainland China and still living in China, Shen Chen is from mainland China and has been living in New York for more than two decades, and Will Kwan, an artist from a younger generation, is from Hong Kong and now living in Toronto. Zhong and Shen both explore aspects of abstraction in their work but in different ways; Zhong has recently introduced it into his primarily figurative work, while Shen has taken a consistent, calculated approach to it for years. Shen, whose work is personal and meditative, and Kwan, whose work is more research-based and conceptual, both speak of, among other things, their experience as diasporic artists, how it plays into their understanding of artistic production, and how it can be both restricting and liberating.

In 2007, Yishu published selected panel discussions from the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council. We are pleased to be publishing selections from the 2009 meetings in this issue as well as in the upcoming issue (May 2010). The panel published in this issue focuses on value—a much under-discussed idea within contemporary art—from its aesthetic, artistic, and market perspectives. While the presenters did not always address contemporary Chinese art directly, many of the issues raised affect various regions throughout Asia and are relevant within the evolution of contemporary art in China, importantly placing it in dialogue with cultures other than the West.

Aspects of curatorial practice also have a strong presence in Yishu 37. While the Asian Art Council serves as a theoretical think tank that feeds the curatorial programming at the Guggenheim, Winston Kyan’s interview with Wu Hung, an important art historian, curator, and supporter of contemporary Chinese art, brings to light the inquisitiveness and thoughtfulness that characterize Wu’s curatorial career from the 1980s to the present. Paul Gladston follows this interview with a healthy debate directed at an essay by Wu Hung included in the publication Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, and Contemporaneity. Discussions about curating continue with my interview with Hou Hanru and Thierry Raspail about Hou’s innovative and provocative curatorial proposition for the 2009 Biennale de Lyon; Clara Galeazzi’s review of the exhibition Emporium: A New Common Sense of Space, an unusual project that integrated the physical, psychological, and sensual space of both the gallery and the artwork; and, finally, Ellen Pearlman’s review of a new book by Huang Rui that is more visual than textual, and as much a curatorial project as it is a publication.

Keith Wallace

photo (top): Will Kwan, X-ray Yankee Zulu (WMD), 2009, neon, 3.65 x 2.43 m. Installation view at Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto, Canada. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of the artist.