Beijing Artists
Artists who have lived and worked in Beijing, from imperial court painters to the city's experimental and contemporary scene.
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About
As China's capital for most of the last seven centuries, Beijing drew painters to serve the court. Under the Qianlong Emperor in the 18th century, the Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione blended European shading with Chinese brushwork for imperial portraits and horses.
Beijing was also where experimental art pushed back. The Stars group hung an unofficial outdoor show in 1979, and the 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition gathered new work just months before Tiananmen. Xu Bing spent years carving invented characters for A Book from the Sky (1987–91). In the 1990s painters such as Fang Lijun, with his bald, grinning figures, and Zhang Xiaogang, with his muted family portraits, lived in artist villages on the city's edge. Ai Weiwei built his studio at Caochangdi, and a disused factory complex known as 798 became a hub for studios.
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