Exhibit Blends Traditional and Modern Chinese Art Styles
Contact: Kuiyi Shen, (740) 593-0586 or shen@ohio.edu
Editors: The following images from the exhibit can be downloaded from the Web.
ATHENS, Ohio (January 2, 2001) -- A monthlong exhibit at Ohio University will feature the works of six contemporary Chinese artists whose styles reflect a unique mixture of ancient tradition and modern experience. The exhibit, titled "Word and Meaning," is scheduled Jan. 9 through Feb. 10 at the Ohio University Art Gallery in Seigfred Hall and Trisolini Art Gallery.
One of the featured artists, Xu Bing, will attend the exhibition's opening at 7 p.m. Jan. 9 in Seigfred Hall and will lecture about his work at 7 p.m. Jan. 11 in Seigfred's Mitchell Auditorium.
The artists, who excel at multilayered forms of expression, use Chinese texts or calligraphy as their subject matter, manipulating them so they no longer carry literal meanings.
"The Chinese artists who have been impacted by international trends and post-Tiananmen cultural ferment are doing some of the most extraordinary work in the contemporary art world," said School of Art Director Power Boothe.
"These are artists working between two worlds. Their work reveals the struggle between the industrial world and the world of ancient Chinese tradition -- a tension that remains a source of strength and the basis for innovation."
The featured artists are MacArthur Fellow Xu Bing, whose work examines the different roles textual images may play in cultural identification; Wenda Gu, an internationally recognized installation and performance artist based in New York City; Wenyi Hou, one of the few female pioneers of the New Wave movement in the mid-1980s; Ku Ping-hsing, a Taiwanese multimedia artist known for his computer art, installations and paintings; Shengtian Zheng, a painter and conceptual artist who has led the way in post-Mao/East-West artistic exchanges; and Zhang Hongtu, an iconoclastic artist who brings pop humor to Chinese and Western traditions.
Ohio University Assistant Professor of Art History Kuiyi Shen originally developed the exhibit in 1999 as a guest curator for the University at Buffalo Art Gallery. Shen, who is overseeing the Ohio University exhibit with School of Art Director of Exhibitions Jenita Landrum-Bittles, describes these contemporary Chinese artists as being at the intersection of their Chinese past and the post-modern Western world.
"This generation of artists who grew up in mainland China during the Cultural Revolution, when art and culture consisted primarily of boldly written slogans and utopian imagery, have sought to distance themselves from a political and social past they reject by undermining the visual traces of that history," Shen said. "The reflection on their unique historical position between a cosmopolitan present and a fading Chinese past has led them to interrogate the meaning of China's written language in the contemporary world."
Ohio University Art Gallery and Trisolini Art Gallary hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
