A redefinition of contemporary Chinese art from the last forty years in the context of unprecedented cultural, political, and urban transformation, written by an authority on the subject. Contemporary Chinese art is a subject of sustained and growing significance in present-day culture across the globe. This new volume in the World of Art series reframes Chinese art since the end of China’s Cultural Revolution more than four decades ago, placing it in the context of the nation’s unprecedented cultural, political, and urban transformation. Based on original research by writer, curator, and leading scholar in the field of contemporary Chinese art, Jiang Jiehong, this volume explores the area through firsthand materials and in-depth interviews with more than thirty artists. Providing the most up-to-date understanding of contemporary Chinese art, Jiang includes a variety of media, ranging from painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography to installation, video, performance, and participatory art. Featuring over 150 color images of artworks by more than fifty internationally renowned Chinese artists, including Ai Weiwei and Zhang Peili, as well as emerging artists, such as Zhao Zhao, The Art of Contemporary China presents a wide variety of practices through curatorial discussions and images of original installation views and historical art events. What emerges are revelations on art, and new insights into contemporary China. Fulfilling a need for an accessible, affordable introduction to contemporary Chinese art, this volume offers a concise but far-reaching survey of the movement.

While readers will come away from Chinese Art with a nuanced understanding of Chinese culture, the volume is also a work of art in its own right—a must-have collectible for any devotee of Chinese art and culture. Assouline’s Ultimate Collection is an homage to the art of luxury bookmaking—the oversized volume is hand-bound using traditional techniques, with several of the plates hand-tipped on art-quality paper and housed in a luxury silk clamshell.

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.

How did art reform fit into the many initiatives for social and cultural change that contributed to the New Cultural Movement that transformed the Chinese cultural landscape during the Republican period? "Modern art for a modern China" was the rallying cry of Chinese intellectuals, many of whom were artists, critics, writers, poets and educators. Wang describes how these groups discussed and implanted changes in China’s conception and practice of art. She demonstrates how art reforms fit into the many initiatives for social and cultural change that contributed to the New Cultural Movement that transformed the Chinese cultural landscape during the Republican period. In doing so, she analyses two key areas in the intellectual history of Republican China: China’s art reform in the early decades of the twentieth century; and the connection and intersection between colonialism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, including their direct impact on the development of art and art practice in China. Modern Art for a Modern China is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of China’s twentieth-century intellectual history and art history.

“The Art of Modern China is a long-awaited, much-needed survey. The authors’ combined experience in this field is exceptional. In addition to presenting key arguments for students and arts professionals, Andrews and Shen enliven modern Chinese art for all readers. The Art of Modern China gives just treatment to an expanded field of overlooked artworks that confront the challenges of modernization.”—De-nin Deanna Lee, author of The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll through Time.

Juliane Noth shows how art and discussions about the future of ink painting were linked to the reshaping of the country, leading to the creation of a uniquely modern Chinese landscape imagery. Noth offers a new understanding of these experiments by studying them as transmedial practice, at once shaped by and integral to the modern global art world.

China's entry into the modern era was shaped by unprecedented internal turmoil and external pressures, which brought a forceful end to two millennia of imperial rule and cultural insularity. The essays in this volume offer a variety of perspectives on the impact of the West on indigenous literature, architecture, painting, and calligraphy during this period (ca. 1860-1980). This book is published in conjunction with the exhibition "Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Chinese Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art", held at the museum from 30th January-19th August 2001.

"How did modern Chinese painters see landscape? Did they depict nature in the same way as premodern Chinese painters? What does the artistic perception of modern Chinese painters reveal about the relationship between artists and the nation-state? Could an understanding of modern Chinese landscape painting tell us something previously unknown about art, political change, and the epistemological and sensory regime of twentieth-century China? Yi Gu tackles these questions by focusing on the rise of open-air painting in modern China. Chinese artists almost never painted outdoors until the late 1910s, when the New Culture Movement prompted them to embrace direct observation, linear perspective, and a conception of vision based on Cartesian optics. The new landscape practice brought with it unprecedented emphasis on perception and redefined artistic expertise. Central to the pursuit of open-air painting from the late 1910s right through to the early 1960s was a reinvigorated and ever-growing urgency to see suitably as a Chinese and to see the Chinese homeland correctly. Examining this long-overlooked ocular turn, Gu not only provides an innovative perspective from which to reflect on complicated interactions of the global and local in China, but also calls for rethinking the nature of visual modernity there."

Chinese art has experienced its most profound metamorphosis since the early 1950s, transforming from humble realism to socialist realism, from revolutionary art to critical realism, then avant-garde movement, and globalized Chinese art. With a hybrid mix of Chinese philosophy, imported but revised Marxist ideology, and western humanities, Chinese artists have created an alternative approach – after a great ideological and aesthetic transition in the 1980s – toward its own contemporaneity though interacting and intertwining with the art of rest of the world. This book will investigate, from the perspective of an activist, critic, and historian who grew up prior to and participated in the great transition, and then researched and taught the subject, the evolution of Chinese art in modern and contemporary times. The volume will be a comprehensive and insightful history of the one of the most sophisticated and unparalleled artistic and cultural phenomena in the modern world.

The modern histories of China and Japan are inexorably intertwined. Their relationship is perhaps most obvious in the fields of political, economic, and military history, but it is no less true in cultural and art history. Yet the traffic in artistic practices and practitioners between China and Japan remains an understudied field. In this volume, an international group of scholars investigates Japan’s impact on Chinese art from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930s. Individual essays address a range of perspectives, including the work of individual Chinese and Japanese painters, calligraphers, and sculptors, as well as artistic associations, international exhibitions, the collotype production or artwork, and the emergence of a modern canon.