KADIST Collection
Artist Features: Pak Sheung Chen,
Tsang Kin Wah, Zhu Fadong, Zhang Huan
 
Editor’s Note
Mainland China’s museum and gallery scene
has evolved rapidly over the past decade. Yishu
84 opens with two essays examining Shanghai,
a city that is taking strategic approaches
in its recognition of culture as an essential
component of a vibrant urban experience. John
Clark focuses on the influence the Shanghai
Biennale has had on galleries and museums,
and Xing Zhao looks into the phenomenon of the
private museums that have recently populated
Shanghai’s West Bund district, both writers
taking note within this growth of the challenges
faced by the art professionals who must fulfill
the programs. These two essays build upon
those presented in earlier issues of Yishu by
Biljana Ciric and Julie Chun and exemplify our
aim to encourage ongoing discourses.
 
Next we present conversations Biljana Ciric
carried out with six Chinese artists who
are included in the collection of KADIST, an
organization based in Paris and San Francisco
that believes in the freedom of creativity.
The artists Ciric selected are for the most
part relatively young, highly experimental,
and make work that operates outside of the
art mainstream. Julia Gwendolyn Schneider
and Helen Wong discuss a Hong Kong-based
artists, Pak Sheung Chuen and Tsang Kin Wah,
respectively, who also take non-conservative
approaches to their artwork. What is
distinct is their mix of the poetical with the
political, which results in a disconcerting and
provocative aesthetic experience.
 
Denisa Tomkova examines Zhu Fadong’s
Identity Cards project, which began in 1998,
and Chan Shing Kwan focuses on Zhang Huan’s
seminal 1994 performance 12m2. These two
artists, whose work in the 1990s reflected their
discontent with the implications of mainland
China’s urban renewal for migrant workers and
the disenfranchised, explore the idea of what
constitutes full participation as a citizen.
Our cover features a portrait of artist Geng
Jianyi in recognition of his recent passing
in December 2017. Geng Jianyi was an
uncompromising artist who made an
indispensible contribution to contemporary
Chinese art beginning with his first exhibition in
the mid-1980s. He was recipient of the 2017 Art
Award of China as Artist of the Year.