Provides a new perspective on the Chinese avant-garde through the figure of artist and activist Tian Han

A groundbreaking book that describes a distinctively Chinese avant-gardism and a modernity that unifies art, politics, and social life. To the extent that Chinese contemporary art has become a global phenomenon, it is largely through the groundbreaking exhibitions curated by Gao Minglu: "China/Avant-Garde" (Beijing, 1989), "Inside Out: New Chinese Art" (Asia Society, New York, 1998), and "The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art" (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2005) among them. As the first Chinese writer to articulate a distinctively Chinese avant-gardism and modernity—one not defined by Western chronology or formalism—Gao Minglu is largely responsible for the visibility of Chinese art in the global art scene today. Contemporary Chinese artists tend to navigate between extremes, either embracing or rejecting a rich classical tradition. Indeed, for Chinese artists, the term "modernity" refers not to a new epoch or aesthetic but to a new nation—modernityinextricably connects politics to art. It is this notion of "total modernity" that forms the foundation of the Chinese avant-garde aesthetic, and of this book. Gao examines the many ways Chinese artists engaged with this intrinsic total modernity, including the '85 Movement, political pop, cynical realism, apartment art, maximalism, and the museum age, encompassing the emergenceof local art museums and organizations as well as such major events as the Shanghai Biennial. He describes the inner logic of the Chinese context while locating the art within the framework of a worldwide avant-garde. He vividly describes the Chinese avant-garde's embrace of a modernity that unifies politics, aesthetics, and social life, blurring the boundaries between abstraction, conception, and representation. Lavishly illustrated with color images throughout, this book will be a touchstone for all considerations of Chinese contemporary art.

Lenni wants to find someone to understand her and the new girl could just be that person Lenni can't please anyone lately. At school, her friends want her to kiss someone for a stupid competition. At home, her grandmother wants her to be more ladylike. And on the playing field, her friend Adam has started acting like a big weirdo around her. Then Lenni meets Jo, the new girl at school, and everything feels so normal. Jo is cool, fun, and unlike anyone Lenni's ever known—finally, someone's on Lenni's wavelength!

Xiaobing Tang's "Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde "is much more than its title implies, for it is both a vivid account of the conflict between Chinese artistic conservatism, freedom of expression, and political commitment in the 1920s and 1930s and a deeply researched study of the origins and development of the woodcut movement. The author ranges widely over the controversial writings of this hectic period, showing how intimately art, literature, criticism, and politics were intertwined, but gives due prominence to such key figures as Cai Yuanpei and Lu Xun. This book will attract many readers for the vigor and lucidity of Tang's style and will become an essential source for anyone concerned with the cultural history of this turbulent era.--Michael Sullivan, author of "Modern Chinese Artists: A Biographical Dictionary" "Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde" is a genuine masterpiece of scholarship, an impressively documented cultural history of the Republican period. In five substantial chapters written in highly lucid and eloquent prose, Xiaobing Tang reconstructs, in detail, the art world of the Republican era, with all its different styles, organisations, institutions, and individuals, and provides cross-references to contemporaneous events in other fields, especially literature. Presenting the emergence of the woodblock printing movement in the context of other art movements, traditionalist and modernist, this book offers an art history of the period more comprehensive than any other, in Chinese or in English.--Michel Hockx, Professor of Chinese, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London "This is one of the first books in English to connect the literature and the fine arts of the early twentieth century. The author follows Lu Xun, one of the leading proponents of the revival of woodblock printmaking in early republican China, as the central thread in a narrative examining the intersections of art education, visual art, literature, and the cinema. Drawing on a wide variety of published materials, Tang successfully puts avant-garde work of the 1930s into a much broader cultural perspective."--Kuiyi Shen, author of "A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China"

Invaluable resource for anyone who wants to understand contemporary Chinese art, one of the most fascinating art scenes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

DIVAn anthology of translated short stories from Chinese writers of the 1980s. Authors considered “avant-garde” because work reflects the seriousness of revolutionary concerns, the disinterest in the progress of the Chinese nation and celebra/div

This book examines the works of three leading writers-Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei-and their significant contributions to the genre of Chinese avant-garde fiction.

Book on Chinese cinema and literature

"What forces continue to oppress and restrain women artists in contemporary China? Some powerful answers are provided in this fictional memoir of Xiao Lu, who played an important role in the avant-garde cultural scene during the tumultuous early months of 1989. The acclaimed "China/AvantGarde" exhibition organized by Gao Minglu at the National Art Museum in Beijing was shut down after about three hours from its opening Feb. 5 1989, when Xiao Lu shot live bullets into her mock-up of two telephone booths, turning an edgy installation work into an over-the-edge performance piece and an icon of the modern Chinese art movement. Many questions were left unanswered from where she got the gun to what she meant by all this. As it turns out, the man and the woman pictured in these two phone booths were specific people, and she was one of them the daughter of the director of a provincial art academy. Her father helped her get into the Central Academy in Beijing, where she was abused in various ways. In the 1989 exhibition, symbolically, she shot her nemesis, then went outside to a public telephone, called him, and told him what she had done. These events are naturally at the center of her memoir, but in describing the events and their aftermath, she offers remarkably candid views on the difficulties facing women in contemporary art circles and the way cultural power is exercised in China."--Publisher description.