Search results for ""Author Wu Hung""

No other civilization in the pre-modern world was more obsessed with creating underground burial structures than the Chinese. For at least five thousand years, from the fourth millennium BCE to the early twentieth century, Chinese people devoted an extraordinary amount of wealth and labor to building tombs and furnishing them with exquisite objects and images. In art history these ancient burial sites have mainly been appreciated as 'treasure troves' of exciting and often previously unknown works of art. New trends in Chinese art history are challenging this way of studying funerary art: now an entire memorial site--rather than any of its individual components--has become the focus of both observation and interpretation. "The Art of the Yellow Springs" expands on this scholarship by making interpretative methods the direct subject of consideration. It argues that to achieve a genuine understanding of Chinese tombs we need to reconsider a host of art-historical concepts, including visuality, viewership, space, formal analysis, function, and context. Profusely illustrated with many outstanding works of art, this ground-breaking new assessment demonstrates the amazing richness of arguably the longest and most persistent tradition in the entirety of Chinese art.

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Constructed over a millennium from the fourth to fourteenth centuries CE near Dunhuang, an ancient border town along the Silk Road in northwest China, the Mogao Caves comprise the largest, most continuously created, and best-preserved treasure trove of Buddhist art in the world. Previous overviews of the art of Dunhuang have traced the caves' unilinear history. This book examines the caves from the perspective of space, treating them as physical and historical sites that can be approached, entered, and understood sensually. It prioritizes the actual experiences of the people of the past who built and used the caves. Five spatial contexts provide rich material for analysis: Dunhuang as a multicultural historic place; the Mogao Cave complex as an evolving entity; the interior space of caves; interaction of the visual program with architectural space; and pictorial space within wall paintings that draws viewers into an otherworldly time. With its novel approach to this repository of religious art, Spatial Dunhuang will be a must-read for anyone interested in Buddhist art and for visitors to Dunhuang.

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When it is completed in 2009 the Three Gorges Dam, a hydroelectric dam that spans the Yangzi River in China, will generate enough electricity to power four cities the size of Los Angeles. Despite the fact that it will drastically reduce coal consumption and eliminate 100 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year, the project is enmeshed in controversy. Since construction began in 1994, nearly one thousand neighboring towns and villages have been submerged and over one million people have been displaced by the dam's 375-mile reservoir.With "Displacement", the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art extends a series of exhibition catalogs produced in conjunction with renowned Chinese art scholar and curator Wu Hung. This fascinating project reveals how four leading Chinese artists - Chen Qiulin, Liu Xiaodong, Yun-Fei Ji, and Zhuang Hui - have confronted the Three Gorges Dam, employing a variety of contemporary techniques to respond to the massive forced migration of people, the demolition of ancient architecture, and the devastation of the local landscape.Alongside the catalog's lavish illustrations are three essays, penned by Wu Hung, Stephanie Smith, and Jason McGrath, which range in topic from contemporary art and environmental sustainability to Chinese film and its treatment of the dam. In addition, interviews conducted with each of the artists offer insight into their work and address the difficult task of relating artistic practice to the wider world.

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In this first systematic introduction to contemporary Chinese art, Wu Hung provides an accessible, focused and much-needed narrative of the development of Chinese art across all media from the 1970s to the 2000s. From its underground genesis during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), contemporary Chinese art has become a dynamic and hugely influential force in a globalized art world where the distinctions between Eastern and Western culture are rapidly collapsing. The book is a richly illustrated and easy-to-navigate chronological survey that considers contemporary Chinese art both in the context of China's specific historical experiences and in a global arena. Wu Hung explores the emergence of avant-garde or contemporary art - as opposed to officially sanctioned art - in the public sphere after the Cultural Revolution; the mobilization by young artists and critics of a nationwide avant-garde movement in the mid-1980s; the re-emphasis on individual creativity in the late 1980s, the heightened spirit of experimentation of the 1990s; and the more recent identification of Chinese artists, such as Ai Weiwei, as global citizens who create works for an international audience.

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This text raises questions about artistic freedom and censorship. Wu Hung uses the Chinese government's cancellation of the exhibition "It's Me", Beijing 1998, to anchor his analysis of the challenges face by contemporary Chinese artisits and curators. Mainland China is experiencing many rapid changes, and many artists and curators are seeking new ways to show work, and find new allies, patrons and audiences. These people are investigating ways to respond to official antagonism and realize the potential of experimental art in the public sphere, as well as how to maintain the independence of this art in a commercialized society. These issues are addressed by Wu Hung through a survey of exhibition practices, a discussion of the Smart Museum exhibition "Canceled: Exhibiting Experimental Art in China", a case study of "It's Me", and a collection of materials from 11 other exhibitions.

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This book tells two stories about the full-length mirror. One story, through time and space, crisscrosses the globe to introduce a broad range of historical actors: kings and slaves, artists and writers, merchants and craftsmen, courtesans and commoners. The other story explores the connections between object, painting and photography, the full-length mirror providing a new perspective on historical artefacts and their images in art and visual culture. The Full-Length Mirror represents a new kind of global art history in which ‘global’ is understood in terms of both geography and visual medium, a history encompassing Europe, Asia and North America, and spanning over two millennia from the fourth century BCE to the early twentieth century.

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