Waste Not: Zhao Xiangyuan & Song Dong (2009)

“Waste Not is an exhibit by Chinese artist Song Dong that displays over 10,000 domestic objects formerly owned by his late mother, who refused to throw anything away if she could possibly reuse it. She had suffered poverty during China’s turmoils in the 1950s and 1960s and had acquired a habit of thrift and re-use that led her to store domestic objects of all kinds in her tiny house in Beijing. After the death of her husband in 2002, her desire to hoard items became an obsession that began to have an impact on her standard of living. Song and his sister managed to alleviate it by persuading her to let him use her possessions as an art installation, reflecting her life and the modern history of China as experienced by one family. First exhibited in Beijing in 2005, Waste Not has since travelled around the world to major galleries in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, where it has been well received by critics.” Wikipedia

Edited by Wu Hung
Publisher Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo, and Beijing Tokyo Art Projects, Beijing, 2009
ISBN 9784904149027, 4904149025
188 pages

WorldCat

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Wu Hung: Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (1999)

“In a novel approach to avant-garde Chinese art, the 1999 exhibition Transience established a historical framework for current artistic production in China. Organized by the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the show and its catalog highlighted the diverse responses of twenty-two artists to China’s recent history and current social transformation.

Written by Wu Hung, a leading authority and the curator of the exhibit, Transience explores contemporary Chinese art through the themes of demystification, ruins, and transience, and represents an original perspective in the continuing discussion on Chinese experimental art.”

Publisher David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 1999
ISBN 0935573275, 9780935573275
214 pages

Reviews: Julia F. Andrews (CAA Reviews, 2001).

WorldCat

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China’s New Art, Post-1989, with a Retrospective from 1979-1989 (1993)

“This is the catalogue for the seminal exhibition China’s New Art Post-1989, the first major collection of Chinese experimental art to be exhibited outside of the country. It was first held in Hong Kong in 1993 and subsequently travelled to Australia and the United States.

The present catalogue offers an in-depth study of the various artistic undercurrents and general cultural sensibilities for the creation of experimental art in China during the late 1980s and the early 1990s, through 17 essays from a number of noted critics and art historians. The artists are placed and studied under various categories, namely ‘Political Pop’ (pp 1-65), ‘Cynical Realism: Irreverence and Malaise’ (67-103), ‘The Wounded Romantic Spirit’ (105-141), ‘Emotional Bondage: Fetishism and Sado-Masochism’ (143-185), ‘Ritual and Purgation: Endgame Art’ (187-201), and ‘Introspection and Retreat into Formalism: New Abstract Art’ (203-233).

As Chang Tsongzung, one of the curators of the exhibition, writes, ‘The art of the Post-1989 period was significant as it characterised the spirit of the new decade, closing the chapter of the 1980s. It was important also for the fact that it presented to the world the first major coherent overview of China’s experimental art scene, and has maintained a continuing dialogue ever since.'”

Edited by Valerie C. Doran
Publisher Hanart T Z Gallery, Hong Kong, 1993
ISBN 9627376027, 9789627376026
cvii+232 pages

WorldCat

PDF, PDF (34 MB)

See also Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art From 1980-1990 online resource.