Chinese Art Outside China Published by Edizioni Charta
Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China Published by Edizioni Charta. Milano, Italy, 2007 Jonathan Goodman ell conceived and well written, Melissa Chiu’s Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China Wconsiders the Chinese artistic diaspora— painters and sculptors, performance artists and conceptual practitioners who left the Mainland in favour of greater aesthetic freedom in America, Europe, and Australia. After the events on June 4, 1989, at Tian’anmen Square, the democracy movement in China was crushed, and many artists sought to escape what had become a prison house for the intelligentsia. At the same time, however, as Chiu points out in a perceptive introduction, there was a general exodus that had to do with cultural restlessness as much as political oppression. She finds that not everybody wanted to leave; she quotes Ah Xian, Cover of Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China. a ceramic artist who settled in Australia: “Once we had Image: Ah Xian, Human Human—Landscape 1, 00-00. Courtesy Edizioni Charta, Milano. the chance to go overseas, we tried as hard as we could to stay” . And most recently, many Chinese artists have returned to China, including such major figures as Zhang Huan, who never gave up his Chinese passport while working in America, and Xu Bing, who has accepted the post of vice president at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees more than two decades ago. Chiu rightly suggests that the ebb and flow of immigration by Chinese artists is complicated, and much of her book, which is devoted to case studies of individual artists, claims a greater complexity for these figures than what the general perception might assert.
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