CategoriesStyles and Movements
Contemporary Chinese Art
Art made in mainland China since the late 1970s, as artists moved from official Socialist Realism to experimental painting, installation and media.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Contemporary Chinese Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
In September 1979 the Stars group hung paintings and woodcarvings on the railings outside the national art museum in Beijing. When police closed it, the artists marched in protest. It marked the start of an independent art scene after the Cultural Revolution.
After 1989 many painters turned to irony. Fang Lijun painted bald, yawning young men against empty skies; Wang Guangyi set Cultural Revolution poster figures beside Western brand names in his Great Criticism series; Zhang Xiaogang based his Bloodline portraits on stiff family photographs. Others worked with ideas and materials: Xu Bing with invented script, Cai Guo-Qiang with gunpowder, Zhang Huan with his own body, Ai Weiwei with antique furniture and porcelain, including the millions of handmade porcelain husks of Sunflower Seeds (2010). Since the 2000s former factory districts such as Beijing's 798 have housed studios, and younger artists like Cao Fei have explored virtual worlds and urban life.
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