|
|
 |
| |
China Avant-Garde (93-98)
Xing Danwen
9/6/2006 - 9/24/2006
Chinese Contemporary Xchange
OPENING RECEPTION: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 - 7-10 pm |
| |
Xing Danwen is among one of the most well-known Chinese photographers today. She was born in 1967 in Xi’an, China during the initial years of the Cultural Revolution. In 1988, she moved to Beijing and did her BFA study in the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Her academic training was in oil painting but her enthusiasm in photography grew and this was to become her major direction in the years ahead. Many of the influencial artists in the 90s are her art schoolmates and colleagues back from the student days in Xi'an and Beijing.
After the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, there was political pressure suppressing the art scene. Nonetheless, in the winter of 1989, Beijing held its first exhibition of Chinese contemporary art at the National Gallery. At the exhibition, a public performance of a gun shooting a telephone booth caused a traumatic scandal in the art world in China. It was the first officially recognized happening in China's art history.
The 1990s was the most exciting period for performance and installation art in China. The decade saw the transition of traditional Chinese art to contemporary practices adapting largely international vocabulary. In the early 1990s, many artists who worked as painters suddenly took off their clothes and performing naked in public. Traditional value was challenged and gave way to the birth of the much anticipated avant-garde art form.
Danwen was in the right place at the right time.
In between 1993 to 1998, Danwen documented many performances, installations and portrait of the artists. Some of these events took place in the East Village of Beijing. The series has over 250 photographs and is going to be published by Scalo under the title “Wo Men - a Personal Diary of Chinese Avant-Garde Art in the 1990s”. Some of these photographs were taken by invitation from the artists to document their work, and others were events Danwen photographed for European magazines. These pictures are remarkable in a way that they are the documentation of an exceptional period of time - when Chinese art broke through barriers and traditional burden and marched on an unprecedented scale towards globalism. The movement resulted in worldwide heated pursuance of exhibiting and collecting Chinese contemporary art in museums, festivals and biennales.
In 2002, the OP Print Program issued a special edition of this body of work. It consists of 100 documents, all are 8x10 inches chromogenic prints, and each image is produced in 100 editions. Each print is titled and numbered by Xing with the artist's seal on verso. |
 |
|
| |
Chinese Contemporary Xchange
50 Gladstone Avenue,
Toronto, M6J 3K6 Ontario
Gallery Hours: 1-6 pm (Wednesday to Sunday)
416.535.6957
|
If you need to use high resolution files please send us an email: mail@indexg.com
|
|
|
|
