Issue No. 3:
Reflections (2020)
Yang Jiechang with One Hundred Layers of Ink Works at Les Magiciens de la Terre.
This issue of Guan Kan develops the idea of a contemporary art taking place in a rapidly changing China. It attempts to take a moment out of the shifting regime of politics around both the Chinese government and the pandemic to look into artists and curators whose work meditates upon living through crises of different kinds. Living with constant change is not unfamiliar for Chinese artists and curators, who here remember the Cultural Revolution and the censorship of their projects, who are harassed by the police and who perform the banality of online cultural phenomena in the real world. In every way these artists are attempting to create a criticality around their situation, and around the unfolding of history into the twenty-first century.
A Meeting with Li Xianting
Li Xianting has been China’s leading art critic as well as an editor and curator for almost fifty years. During the 1960s he was imprisoned for two years for attempting to foster dialogue between his classmates.
Field Notes: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong
The question of whether we can trace a ‘beginning’ of contemporary art in China requires an understanding of the historical circumstances which precipitated the creation and development of Chinese contemporary art within a global context.
Deng Zhen: Transformative Photography and Incongruous Performance
Deng Zhen, a contemporary artist from Loudi, Hunan province, China, presents a nihilistic observational depiction of his environment, particularly unique in his manipulation of objects, icons and perspective to shift one’s perception and create beautiful or striking images.
Reflection of Changing Chinese Society in Qi Zhilong’s Art
Qi Zhilong is a Chinese artist most well known for his work during the Political Pop movement in the 1990s. With a self-admitted ‘obsession’ (Supangkat, 2009) with the exploration of women and beauty, Qi paints mainly female subjects which he uses as a metaphor for individuality and femininity.
The dissident sculpture of Ai Song
Tucked away behind a winding, sandy track roughly an hour from Beijing’s popular 798 art zone an isolated house stands, neighbour-less, as if it were hiding – which it is. It is the third house Ai Song has lived in recently after being chased out of his last two following government raids.
The impact of the Cultural Revolutions on Chinese contemporary art
Since the 1940s, China has been on a unique course of historical development. This essay will analyse Zhang Linhai’s artworks at different times over the course of this development, and through his life’s experience of it.
Zhang Linhai: Self-expression and social commentary through childhood memories
Light seeps through the windows, illuminating the walls of the studio space; Zhang’s artworks dominate the wall space, houseplants sit in every corner, and paints cover the workbenches—a truly ethereal setting—Zhang Linhai’s studio.
Art Escaping Reality: Zhang Linhai’s reflections upon past and present experiences of China through contemporary art
Art has been a means by which Chinese creators have been able to respond to social and political states and changes throughout the contemporary era, though not with great success, due to government shutdown and censorship.