Yishu 75 opens with a text by Shao-Lan Hertel that explores cross-cultural encounters among three artists—Wang Dongling, Roman Verostko, and Andreas Schmid—as it pertains to the evolution of calligraphy in China during the 1980s and into the 90s, a relatively early period for contemporary Chinese art, and the subsequent interaction with aspects of Western abstract art. This is followed by Carol Yinghua Lu’s rumination on the painter Xie Nanxing, whose highly conceptual works both challenge the practice of painting and propose a provocative dialogue between the figurative and the abstract. Adam Monohon writes about Zhang Kechun’s pensive photographs that bring into play interactions between simple daily activities and the signs of social and economic changes that have taken place along China’s vast Yellow River.
Hong Kong has experienced changes of a different kind during the past decade, both socially and culturally, and John Batten offers an update on the Hong Kong art scene and, in particular, the strong assertion of its sense of identity and growing internationalism following the Umbrella Protests of 2014. Issues of identity also arise through perspectives from the Hong Kong diaspora as expressed in the reflections of Alice Ming Wai Jim and Henry Tsang on the recent new media work of susan pui san lok and her dynamic video montage emphasizing the magic and motion of wuxia, a genre that represents for the rest of the world an imaginary China.
Claudia Bohn-Spector discusses an exhibition of new media work from Taiwan and these artists’ exploration of the vulnerable relationship between nature, society, and science. Wang Bing and Lu Huanzhi test the conventions of what constitutes art—the former, as author Brian Karl points out, by showing his documentary-like films of the marginalized in the context of an art gallery in addition to the cinema circuit, the latter by presenting a fictional novel as a work of art. While Lu Huanzhi’s writing functions as an artwork it also serves as an inventive commentary on the condition of the artist and the state of contemporary art within society today.
Image (top): Zhang Kechun, People Drink Tea by the River, from the series Between the Mountains and Water, 2013, archival pigment print, 107.95 x 132 cm. © Zhang Kechun. Courtesy of Beetles + Huxley, London.