Wu Hung: Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (1999)
Filed under book, catalogue | Tags: · 1980s, 1990s, art, art history, china, contemporary art
“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).
Comment (0)China’s New Art, Post-1989, with a Retrospective from 1979-1989 (1993)
Filed under catalogue | Tags: · 1980s, 1990s, art, china, contemporary art, painting, sculpture
“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
See also Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art From 1980-1990 online resource.
Comment (0)Chris Kraus: Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1990s, art, art criticism
“Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes’ Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.”
Publisher Semiotext(e), New York, 2004
Active Agents series
ISBN 1584350229, 9781584350224
217 pages
Review: Tessa Laird (JOAAP).
PDF (18 MB, no OCR)
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