The Four Olds or the Four Old Things was a term used during the Cultural Revolution by the student-led Red Guards in the People's Republic of China in reference to the pre-communist elements of Chinese culture they attempted to destroy. The Four Olds were: Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Customs. The campaign to destroy the Four Olds began in Beijing on August 19, 1966, shortly after the launch of the Cultural Revolution.
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.
The Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art is one of the most important Russian cultural events and was founded in 2003.
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 early 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.
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.
Zhang Hongtu is a Chinese artist based in New York City.
Tiananmen Square or Tian'anmen Square is a city square in the city center of Beijing, China, located near the city's Central Business District and named after the eponymous Tiananmen located to its north, which separates it from the Forbidden City. The square contains the Monument to the People's Heroes, the Great Hall of the People, the National Museum of China, and the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China in the square on October 1, 1949; the anniversary of this event is still observed there. The size of Tiananmen Square is 765 x 282 meters. It has great cultural significance as it was the site of several important events in Chinese history.
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.
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 Chairman Mao Zedong and other Communist officials inaugurating 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 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.
Xiao Lu is a Chinese artist who works with installation art and video art. She became famous in 1989, when she participated in the 1989 China/Avant-Garde Exhibition with her work, Dialogue. Just two hours after the exhibition opened, she suddenly shot her own work with a gun, causing an immediate shutdown of the exhibition. When the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred four months later, her actions were heavily politicized, referred to as “the first gunshots of Tiananmen”.
Gao Minglu is a scholar in Chinese contemporary art. He is the Chair of the Department of Art History, Professor for Distinguished Service, and Chair of Art and is an instructor at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also distinguished professor at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts.
The founding of the People's Republic of China was formally proclaimed by Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), on October 1, 1949 at 3:00 pm in Tiananmen Square in Peking, now Beijing, the new capital of China. The formation of the Central People's Government under the leadership of the CCP, the government of the new nation, was officially proclaimed during the proclamation speech by the chairman at the founding ceremony.
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 1989–2008, 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.
