Documentary of Chinese Contemporary Art 2010

In 2010, when came the Chinese New Year, a striking exhibition named Documentary of Chinese Contemporary Art was held in Washington D.C., the capital city of the United States. This exhibition, hosted and organized by the US Asian Culture Conservation Committee and the US Asian Cultural Academy, as well as the Library of Congress, American Folklife Centre and National Art Archive, attracted a lot peers in the field of art and audiences from universities and institutions. 

In the past 25 years, the turbulent development of the contemporary art in China deeply influenced the art and values of Chinese society and attracted increasing attention from global art markets. The joint project “Record Today for the Future” operated by American Folklife Centre, the Library of Congress and US Asian Cultural Academy, has already be implemented for more than 6 years with fruitful outcomes, including artworks, collections, presentations and videos, interviews, reviews and criticism, and other types of archives that can represent the history, evolution and interrelationships of or between various arts. The special criteria of selection enable the project to present the development of contemporary art in China profoundly and completely and to be representatives in the entire historical process.

 

These influential attendants and witnesses of the contemporary art in China are: HUANG Gesheng, WANG Yigang, WEI guangqin, XU Lei, SU Xinping, YUAN Jinhua and so on. Since 1985 the contemporary fine art in China has been motivated and practiced in many aspects. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Chinese traditional arts commenced the conversation with the rest of the world. These two milestones are promotedby those Chinese artists and their keen sense of art, their imaginativecreation, their courage and wisdom for breaking throughthe habitofaesthetic, and their priceless contribution to the traditional art and contemporary fine art in China. Their artworks and their recognizable messages delivered to the publics present the development of art, culture and the standpoints of intellectuals in China in the past twenty years. On the basis of the actual social processes in China, their artworks, inspirited by contemporary characteristics of the traditional culture, not only combine but also refine the traditional cultures and fine arts together to set up their own cultural symbols for the new age of China. The growth of those artists, their masterpieces and research documents are now collected in the National Library and the American Folklife Centre of the United States, which are considered as one of the highest academia institutions in the world. 

 

Dr. Mark Goebel, the header of the American Asia Culture Institution, introduced that this documentary exhibition is an important retrospective of the project titled as “Record Today for the Future”. This exhibition also consists certain documents of Chinese musicians, including QIU Shuwei, SONG Zhuying, YANG Jiqiang and TAN Jing.

 

This retrospective exhibition was lasted for one month. It is associated by the National Library, the American Folklife Centre and the American Asia Cultural Institution, where all exhibited documents and files are collected. This exhibition are also supported and sponsored by Archives of American Art, World Bank, The University of Maryland, Columbia University and United States Naval Academy.