Asia Art Archive presents “Japan and Contemporary Chinese Art 1989–1993,” a public talk by Sydney-based scholar Olivier Krischer.
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.
“Japan and Contemporary Chinese Art 1989–1993” is supported by 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).