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Tag Archives: Qiu Zhijie

Some (Special) Things an Artist Can Do

Published in another version in LEAP. Text by Robin Peckham. This past year has seen the consolidation of a number of strategies for adapting to the at times paradoxical but always parallel challenges of survival and production, many of which would be unrecognizable or even barred from the institutionalized cosmopolitan alternative systems by which they [...]

On Pretension

“Existential Emptiness: On pretension in art” Published in the Hong Kong Gallery Guide. Text by Robin Peckham. This phrase “existential emptiness” is a weapon, and an almost tautological one at that: does it contain any content beyond an automatic mode of self-critique? But in referring to its own posture toward its presumed object the language [...]

A Past Enacted

Published on ArtSlant. Text by Robin Peckham. Chen Chieh-jen: Empire’s Borders Long March Space 798 Art District, 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing, P.R.C. 4 December 2010 – 10 January 2011 One of the many artists in greater China known for working on a slightly more subtle and sophisticated level of political discourse, Chen Chieh-jen [...]

Art and (Higher) Power

Published in the Hong Kong Gallery Guide. Text by Robin Peckham. The place of spirituality in the Western art of our time is more or less clear: innovative art has consistently defined itself in relationship to mainstream religion, and the heritage of symbols and sensations of affect from the Christian tradition remains steady across the [...]

Carlos Cruz-Diez: Environment Chromatic Interferences

Published on ArtSlant. Text by Robin Peckham. Environment Chromatic Interferences: Interactive Space by Carlos Cruz-Diez Guangdong Museum of Art (Hall 9) 38 Yanyu Rd., Ersha Island, Guangzhou 11 September – 31 October 2010 There was a moment in the late 1990s and early 2000s, coinciding roughly with the lifespan of the Post-Sense Sensibility exhibitions, during [...]

Minsheng Musings

First published on ArtSlant China. Text by Robin Peckham. Thirty Years of Chinese Contemporary Art Minsheng Art Museum 570 West Huaihai Rd., Bldg. F, Red Town International Art Community, 200050 Shanghai, China, China April 19, 2010 – July 18, 2010 Last week saw the grand opening of the Minsheng Art Museum, an institution owned by [...]

Light Art in China

The Sculpture of He An, Lam Tung-Pang, and Yu Bogong Text by Robin Peckham Light sculpture is a relatively well-established mode in international contemporary art, existing somewhere in the territory between a sculptural medium and a conceptual movement. Growing out of minimalism proper, its best-known practitioners generally work with neon tubing as the preferred material [...]

Sun Huiyuan and the Status of Creativity

Text by Robin Peckham There is a particular artistic ethic at work in Hangzhou today, largely traceable to the halls of the New Media Department of the China Academy of Fine Arts, led by the venerable educators Zhang Peili and Qiu Zhijie. This artistic ethic–it would be remiss to call it an aesthetic–is a conceptual [...]