Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1994 in Kansas City, Missouri. With a $5 million annual budget and approximately 75,000 visitors each year, it is Missouri's first and largest contemporary museum.
Sui Jianguo, professor and ex-chairman of the Department of Sculpture in Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, is a contemporary Chinese artist.
Yue He is a fictional character in Water Margin, one of the Four Great Classical Novels in Chinese literature. Nicknamed "Iron Whistle", he ranks 77th among the 108 Stars of Destiny and 41st among the 72 Earthly Fiends.
Photography in China dates back to the mid-19th century with the arrival of European photographers in Macao. In the 1850s, western photographers set up studios in the coastal port cities, but soon their Chinese assistants and local competition spread to all regions.
Zhang Xiaogang is a contemporary Chinese symbolist and surrealist painter. Paintings in his Bloodline series are predominantly monochromatic, stylized portraits of Chinese people, usually with large, dark-pupiled eyes, posed in a stiff manner deliberately reminiscent of family portraits from the 1950s and 1960s. Recently, he also created sculptures, translating for the first time into three dimensions many characters of the sort seen in his "Bloodlines—Big Family" portrait series. These sculptures have featured in many exhibits and continue his work as one of China's leading, and most highly sought-after, contemporary artists.
Yan Pei-Ming, born 1 December 1960, is a Chinese painter. Since 1981 he has been living in Dijon, France. His most famous paintings are "epic-sized" portraits of Mao Zedong worked out in black and white or red and white. He works with big brushes, and his paintings are brought to life by the rapid brush strokes which structure the picture space.
Relational art or relational aesthetics is a mode or tendency in fine art practice originally observed and highlighted by French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud. Bourriaud defined the approach as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space." The artist can be more accurately viewed as the "catalyst" in relational art, rather than being at the centre.
Wu Shanzhuan is an artist based in Hamburg.
The Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC) is a non-profit organization located in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. Founded in 1974, it's 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.
Liu Bolin is a contemporary artist born in China's Shandong province, who specialises in self-portraits where he is disguised to match his surroundings. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Shandong College of Arts in 1995 and his Master of Fine Arts from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2001. His work has been exhibited in museums around the world. Also known as "the invisible man", Liu's most popular works are from his "Hiding in the City" series, photographic works that began as performance art in 2005 in response to the artists' village in which he worked in Beijing being demolished in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Huang Rui is a Chinese artist known for his social and cultural criticism.
China/Avant-Garde Exhibition is one of the most significant exhibitions in the history of Chinese contemporary art. Opening on February 5, 1989 at the National Art Museum of China, this exhibition included over 186 artists and approximately 300 artworks from all over China. Widely regarded as a pivotal moment in the history of contemporary Chinese art, the exhibition provided a comprehensive view of the experimental works that emerged in mainland China after 1985. Examples of experimental artworks included Xiao Lu's impromptu performance where the artist used a loaded handgun to shoot her own artwork called Dialogue and Wu Shanzhuan in his work called Big Business sold frozen shrimp in a makeshift market stand. These works, among others, led to the temporary closing of the exhibition.
Yang Yongliang is a Chinese contemporary artist.
Yuan Gong, is a Chinese contemporary artist. He has obtained a PhD degree in theory of art at the Chinese National Academy of Arts in 2012, but has immersed himself in different aspects of Chinese contemporary art since the 1990s. Being both creator and researcher, designer and planner, Yuan is a multiple facets artist playing at the interface of conceptual art, performance and fine arts. Using a large variety of media, his artworks address many philosophical questions, reflecting his concerns about the Chinese society and impugning the art system, the exhibition format and the status of the artwork.
The Founding Ceremony of the Nation is a 1953 oil painting by Chinese artist Dong Xiwen. It depicts Mao Zedong and other Communist Party officials proclaiming the People's Republic of China at Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949. A prominent example of socialist realism, it is one of the most celebrated works of official Chinese art. The painting was repeatedly revised, and a replica painting made to accommodate further changes, as some of the leaders it depicted fell from power and later were rehabilitated.
Gao Jianfu was a Cantonese artist during World War II. He is known for leading the Lingnan School's effort to modernize Chinese traditional painting as a "new national art." Along with his brother Gao Qifeng and friend Chen Shuren, Gao Jianfu brought the nihonga style of painting to China.
The Stars Art Group or simply "The Stars" was a Chinese avant-garde group of non-professional artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was founded by Ma Desheng and Huang Rui and included Wang Keping (王克平), Qu Leilei, Ah Cheng, Ai Weiwei, and Li Shuang (artist) as the only female member. A historically significant exhibition, now called the Star Art Exhibition, took place in late 1979 in Beihai Park, Beijing, outside the China Art Gallery. After the exhibition was closed by officials, the group staged a protest for cultural openness. They succeeded in reopening the exhibition. The exhibition took place between 23 November and 2 December, in which around 200,000 people attended the event. The group organized another exhibition the next year. Around and after 1983, the group disbanded, partly due to their members going into exile under political pressure, especially the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of 1983.
The proclamation of the People's Republic of China was made by Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), on October 1, 1949, in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The government of a new state under the CCP, formally called the Central People's Government, was proclaimed by Mao at the ceremony, which marked the foundation of the People's Republic of China.
Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World is an exhibition that took place at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York between October 6, 2017 – January 7, 2018. The exhibition presents works by seventy-one artists and artist collectives across China and worldwide, who define contemporary experience in and of China. Looking at a period between the Tiananmen Square Protests, which also coincides with the end of the Cold War, and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the exhibition explores a time when "anything seemed possible" and artists from China sought visibility in the global art world. The curators of the exhibition write that the works in this exhibition respond to how China went through a radical transformation between 1989 and 2008, which had an unmatchable impact at the global level. The exhibition has been considered as "an invaluable window" onto the intersection of contemporary art, politics, and history, and as an opportunity to ask questions about the role of museums as sites of learning how one could be a global citizen today. It also traveled to Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
Claude Hudelot was a French sinologist, historian, radio show producer, and director of documentaries. He directed multiple cultural establishments within France and was a cultural attaché in China for eight years.
