A History of Contemporary Chinese Art

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

   PDF

2. Visual Utopia: Art in the Seventeen Years (1949–1966)

   • Zhou Yan

   Pages 1-42

3. Anti-Culture: Art of Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)

   • Zhou Yan

   Pages 43-84

4. Truth, Virtue and Beauty: Art in the Post-Cultural Revolution (1977–1984)

   • Zhou Yan

   Pages 85-116

5. An Art Hurricane: The Avant-Garde Movement (1985–1989)

   • Zhou Yan

   Pages 117-265

6. Art Under Impact of Globalization (1989–1999)

   • Zhou Yan

   Pages 267-333

7. Institutionalization and Identity of Contemporary Art (2000-Present)

   • Zhou Yan

   Pages 335-458

8. Back Matter

   Pages 459-518

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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.

• Contemporary Chinese art
• Chinese avant-garde
• contemporary art
• Chinese art history
• global art

• Kenyon College, Gambier, USA

  Yan Zhou

Yan Zhou has been an activist, critic and historian of Chinese contemporary art for three decades, having taught art theory and art history at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China in the 1980s and afterward, at Kenyon College, Ohio, USA, with guest teaching stints at Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, in addition to lectures given in more than thirty art schools, colleges, universities and museums in China and USA. He has widely published on the topic of contemporary Chinese art, including Journey of Culture: Wenda Gu and His Art (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2015),  A History of Chinese Contemporary Art: 1985-1986 (In Chinese, co-author, Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1991) and “Zhang Jianjun: Visual Inquiry into Existence and Temporality” (bilingual, Zhang Jianjun, exhibition catalogue, Shanghai, 2012).

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