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This volume offers a path-breaking reassessment of Xu Bing's oeuvre by analyzing the diverse cultural environments in which his work has developed since the Book from the Sky. It contains three lecture transcripts and eight art historical essays; these explore themes such as Xu's animal works, audience participation, new ink, prints, realism, socialist spectacle, and word play. A critical question addressed in this volume is what carries art to a global level beyond regional histories and cultural symbols.
Absorbing critical essays on contemporary Chinese aesthetics addressing the social context and philosophical concerns that underlie Xu Bing's key works. The authors analyze Xu's art, shedding light on the tangled history of socialism and neoliberalism in the Post-Mao period.
--Prof. Dr. Lothar Ledderose, Senior Professor, Institute of East Asian Art, Universität Heidelberg
List of contents
Acknowledgements.- Introduction.- Reactivating the Tradition.- In Dialogue with Xu Bing.- Audience Participation in Xu Bing's Works.- Revisiting Ink Art.- Art as Mellorism.- Xu Bing's Phoenix: An Aesthetic Image of Labor.- Two-dimensional Space: Reconsidering Chinese Conceptualism in the 1980's.- Thirty Years of Art Criticism on Xu Bing.- The Great Wall of Digital Language: Juxtaposing Tradition and Modernity in Chinese Contemporary Art.- From Small Woodcuts to Experimental Printmaking: Xu Bing in the 1980's.- Breaking Through 'Realism:' On Xu Bing's Art.- Xu Bing as Landscapist.- Revisiting the Media of Chinese 'Avant-garde' in the 1980's.- Xu Bing's Background Story Series.- A Global Map of Xu Bing's Exhibition History 1985-2015.- A Global Chronicle of Contemporary Chinese Art 1985-2015.
About the author
Sarah E. Fraser is the Chair of Chinese Art History and director of Institute of East Asian Art History, Heidelberg University. Her publications include Performing the Visual (2004), How Chinese Art Became Chinese: War, Archaeology, and the Refashioning of Sino-Modernity (1928-1945) (forthcoming), and Women Cross Media: East Asian Photography, Prints, and Porcelain from the Dresden State Art Collection (Arthistoricum, forthcoming).
Yu-Chieh Li is the Judith Neilson Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Art at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney. She was an Andrew W. Mellon C-MAP Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, NY from 2013 to 2015 and adjunct researcher at Tate Research Centre: Asia. Her publications appear in Art in Translation, Art Monthly Australasia, and post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe.
