Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents

The liveliness and creativity of avant-garde Chinese art in the post-Mao era has led to its current prominence in the world of international contemporary art. Yet until now, a systematic introduction to this important work has been unavailable in any Western language; moreover, most of the relevant primary documents have existed only in Chinese, scattered in hard-to-find publications. Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents remedies this situation by presenting a collection of carefully selected texts that includes artists’ manifestos, exhibition catalogue texts, seminal essays by critics, and interviews with key artists, many of them available in English translation for the first time. Arranged in user-friendly chronological order and framed by contextual explanations, these documents guide readers through the fast-moving developments in the Chinese art scene from the late 1970s to the 2000s. As a sourcebook and anthology, this volume is an essential resource for scholarship in the field and introduces the greater public to significant contemporary Chinese artists and their work.