From Being to Doing: Curating Contemporary Chinese Art


The curator Gao Minglu (1998) states: “As a guest curator from Mainland China, my chief concern has been to present the artworks in a theoretical framework within which contemporary Chinese art makes sense to a Western audience.” This “translation model,” by which we mean the curatorial practice that renders new Chinese art legible in light of Euro-American frames of reference, served as a primary curatorial approach in the 1990s. Subsequently, other curatorial approaches have complicated a unified “Chinese” art history, working on regional and synchronic developments that have variously augmented, informed, or displaced older notions of what Chinese contemporary art is. This panel scrutinizes a range of curatorial practices that have engaged with contemporary Chinese art—whether object-based or processual—both inside and outside China from 1990 to the present. Revisiting multiple sites, places, and communities where works were to be created, installed, and presented, panelists analyze cases in which the interests and aspirations of Chinese curators, critics, artists, and other stakeholders are interconnected, sometimes working in concert with each other, and at others at cross purposes. Our goal is to draw attention to diverse regimes of value, identity, creative practice, and imaginaries that complicate our understanding of what has been referred to as “Chinese contemporary art” beyond conventionalized art historical periodizations, precepts, and genealogies.

Field of Study:






Chair:
Ihnmi Jon,Binghamton University - ijon1@binghamton.edu

Curating Rural Reconstruction: Zuo Jing and Art for Community Development
Meiqin Wang, California State University Northridge