Negotiating Cultural Change

The problem of writing history is precisely that history has tended to explore linear narratives of progress which favour a particular form of art or a particular way of seeing art, often at the expense of conflicting cultural attitudes and concerns. This book aims to look at the complexity of cultural change, to explore how artists negotiated cultural choices and how they justified these choices and what it was they advocated - in other words, to see how different cultural trends interact, how artists relate to art history on the one hand and to personal cultural values on the other. These issues became central to the Chinese art world in the 1980s precisely because the whole linear narrative of historical progression had come into crisis. This resulted in an urge not only to re-appraise history, as it had been constructed up to that moment, but also to re-appraise alternative values and ideas which had been obscured, ignored or purged by the dominant narrative.

Features art theorists Gao Minglu, Lang Shaojun, Li Xianting, L? Peng, Pi Daojian, Sun Jin; and artists Ai Zhongxin, Ding Fang, Feng Guodong, Geng Jianyi, Ghazi Amat, Gu Wenda, Jin Shangyi, Keram Nesridin, L? Shengzhong, Ma Lu, Mao Xuhui, Meng Luding, Shen Qin, Sheng Qi, Wu Guanzhong, Wu Shanzhuan and the Red Humour Group, Xu Bing, Ye Yongqing, Zeng Xiaofeng, Zhan Jianjun, Zhang Xiaogang, Zhang Peili, the Stars, the Garze School, the New Literati Painters, and many others. 156 pages, with 66 illustrations.