Olivier Krischer is awarded the Joint Research Grant initiated by Asia Art Archive and New York Museum of Modern Art’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (MoMA C-Map).

Krischer’s research project, “Japan in Contemporary Chinese Art, 1980s–90s,” was one of top proposals submitted to the The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation China Research Grant 2013. Krischer’s project seeks an alternative narrative on how contemporary Chinese art gained international exposure at the closing of twentieth century. Instead of reiterating the East–West interactions, including the Chinese artist circles in New York and Paris, the role of Euro-American collectors, or grand exhibitions like the Venice Biennale, Krischer considers Japan as a significant site for early presentations of contemporary Chinese art.

Recent fieldwork interviews alongside art writing from 1989–93 reveal that Japan offered critical opportunities for Chinese artists and curators to experiment with new modes of practice that enlarged the scope of Chinese art. The multiple displays of bold new art from a rapidly emerging China in Japan somehow symbolically echoed the political and ideological stance of the country when it was reconsidering its role in the Asia-Pacific Region. With an introduction of artists, galleries, exhibitions, writers, and collaborators who promoted contemporary Chinese art and artists in Japan, Krischer’s talk at AAA shares his research on what sort of works were manifested and how they were understood in contemporaneous Japan.

 

Olivier Krischer is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW) at the Australian National University, Canberra. His research concerns twentieth-century China–Japan relations through art, and networks of creative activism in East Asia. Krischer is co-editor of Asia Through Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation Across Borders (2013), and has lectured at the University of Tsukuba, Japan; and University of Sydney, Australia.

 

Judges for The Joint Research Grant include:

Koon Yee-wan, Assistant Professor, Fine Arts Department, University of Hong Kong
Li Xianting, Independent curator and critic, Beijing
Zheng Shengtian, Scholar, Managing Editor, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Vancouver, Canada
Jane DeBevoise, Chair, Board of Directors, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong
Anthony Yung, Senior Researcher, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong

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The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Programme
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The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Programme