Performance art in China has been growing since the 1970s as a response to the very traditional nature of Chinese state-run art schools. It is becoming more and more popular in spite of the fact that it is currently outlawed. In 1999 the importance of contemporary Chinese art was recognized by the inclusion of 19 contemporary Chinese artists in the Venice Biennale. In recent years many of these artists have made performances specifically for photography or film.
Fuck Off was a controversial contemporary art exhibition which ran alongside the Third Shanghai Biennale (2000) in Shanghai, China. The exhibition's title translates as "Uncooperative Attitude" in Chinese, but the blunter English language sentiment was deemed preferable. The exhibition encompassed conceptual, performance, and protest art.
Feng Boyi is an independent art curator and critic in China. His work focusses primarily on contemporary Chinese art, working with museums and displaying art collections. He has worked several times with artist Ai Weiwei, publishing his journals illegally or working with him in exhibitions and has organized many controversial art exhibitions in China. He has been assistant editor of the China Artists' Association newsletter Artist's Communication since 1988. He has also edited and published numerous catalogues and papers on art and established the Artists' Alliance, a major online forum for contemporary art in China. Feng Boyi has been known to be an instigator to the up-and-coming contemporary art movement in Beijing, starting with publishing articles and journals from artists Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing.
Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist and activist. Ai grew up in the far north-west of China, where he lived under harsh conditions due to his father's exile. As an activist, he has been openly critical of the Chinese Government's stance on democracy and human rights. He investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan schools corruption scandal following the collapse of "tofu-dreg schools" in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In 2011, Ai Weiwei was arrested at Beijing Capital International Airport on 3 April, for "economic crimes". He was detained for 81 days without charge. Ai Weiwei emerged as a vital instigator in Chinese cultural development, an architect of Chinese modernism, and one of the nation's most vocal political commentators.
The Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC) is a non-profit organization located in Chinatown in New York City. Founded in 1974, it is one of the earliest Asian American community organizations in the United States. The Arts Centre presents the ongoing developments between contemporary Asian & Asian American art forms and Western art forms through the presentation of performance, exhibitions, and public education. AAAC's permanent collection, which it has accumulated since 1989, contains hundreds of contemporary Asian American art works and traditional/folk art pieces. The organization also has an Artists Archive which documents, preserves, and promotes the presence of Asian American visual culture in the United States since 1945. This includes the East Coast, especially the greater New York area; the West Coast; and some artists in Canada, Hawaii, and overseas. The artists include Asian Americans producing art, Asian artists who are active in the United States, and other Americans who are significantly influenced by Asia. Pan-Asian in outlook, the Arts Centre's understanding of ‘Asia’ encompasses traditions and influences with sources ranging from Afghanistan to Hawaii.
Tang Contemporary Art Gallery is a commercial art gallery with branches in China, Hong Kong and Thailand.
Zuoxiao Zuzhou, real name Wu Hongjin, (吴红巾), is a Chinese musician and artist.
ArtReview is an international contemporary art magazine based in London, founded in 1948. Its sister publication, ArtReview Asia, was established in 2013.
Artist Profile is an international quarterly contemporary art magazine published in Sydney, Australia.
Peter Seitz Adams is an American artist. His body of work focuses on landscapes and seascapes created en plein air in oil or pastel as well as enigmatic figure and still-life paintings. He is noted for his colorful, high-key palette and broad brushwork. Adams has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums, including throughout California, the Western United States, and on the East Coast in Philadelphia, Vermont, and New York. Adams is the longest serving President of the California Art Club and has served on its board of directors in Pasadena, California from 1993 to 2018. He is also a writer on subjects relating to historic artists for the California Art Club Newsletter, as well as for a number of the organization's exhibition catalogs.
The year 2011 in art involved some significant events and new works.
Free Ai Weiwei street art campaign was a series of political street art protest against the PRC government's secret detention of world famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei since 3 April 2011, organised by Hong Kong artists and art supporters. Various slogans calling for the immediate release of the artist such as "Free Ai Weiwei", and "Who's afraid of Ai Weiwei" accompany stencilled images of Ai were applied onto pavements, pedestrian overpass, and building walls all over Hong Kong.
Mami Kataoka is an art curator and writer. She received a BA from Aichi University of Education in 1988.
Get It Louder is a Chinese contemporary art festival that began in 2005 and features exhibitions focusing primarily on young Chinese talent within the spheres of art, architecture, design, literature, film and music. Ou Ning helped launch the project with the help of the agency Modern Media and has served as the biennial's main curator for every year to date except 2012. In an interview, Ou said Get It Louder's inception was meant to showcase young Chinese design talent through a series of traveling exhibitions in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. "Young" in this case is more connected to being "fresh" and "edgy" than a particular age, one of the reasons the older, established artist Ai Weiwei was included in past exhibitions. International, non-Chinese artists and designers have also played a significant part in Get It Louder's exhibitions.
Alexandra Munroe, Ph.D., is a curator, Asia scholar, and author focusing on art, culture, and institutional global strategy. She has produced over 40 exhibitions and published pioneering scholarship on modern and contemporary Asian art. She organized the first major North American retrospectives of artists Yayoi Kusama (1989), Daido Moriyama (1999), Yoko Ono (2000), Mu Xin (2001), Cai Guo-Qiang (2008), and Lee Ufan (2011), among others, and has brought such historic avant-garde movements as Gutai, Mono-ha, and Chinese conceptual art, as well as Japanese otaku culture, to international attention. Her project Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994) is recognized for initiating the field of postwar Japanese art history in North America. Recently, Munroe was lead curator of the Guggenheim’s exhibition, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, which the New York Times named as one of 2017’s top ten exhibitions and ARTnews named as one of the decade’s top 25 most influential shows. Credited for the far-reaching impact of her exhibitions and scholarship bolstering knowledge of postwar Japanese art history in America and Japan, she received the 2017 Japan Foundation Award and the 2018 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award, both bestowed by the government of Japan.
Para Site is an independent, non-profit art space in Hong Kong. It was founded in 1996 by artists Patrick Lee, Leung Chi-wo, Phoebe Man Ching-ying, Sara Wong Chi-hang, Leung Mee-ping, Tsang Tak-ping and Lisa Cheung. It produces exhibitions, public programmes, residencies, conferences, and educational initiatives that aim to develop a critical understanding of local and international contemporary art.
Jeff Kelley is an art critic, author, and curator. A practicing art critic since 1977, his reviews and essays about artists including Chinese conceptual artist Ai Weiwei have appeared in publications including Artforum, Art in America, and the Los Angeles Times.
Kui Hua Zi is an art installation created by contemporary artist and political activist Ai Weiwei. It was first exhibited at the Tate Modern art gallery in London from 12 October 2010 to 2 May 2011. The work consisted of one hundred million individually hand-crafted porcelain sunflower seeds which filled the gallery's 1,000 square metre Turbine Hall to depth of ten centimetres.
Yours Truly is a 2019 American documentary film about the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, especially concerning an exhibition at Alcatraz, a former prison on an island near San Francisco, California, USA.
