Yishu covers many aspects of contemporary Chinese art, such as artists, exhibitions, and timely issues through essays, interviews, and symposia. Yishu 91 presents a selection of texts that were presented at the symposium From a History of Exhibition Toward a Future of Exhibition Making, hosted at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, in November 2018.
This symposium, one of three on this subject organized by curator and writer Biljana Ciric, explores the importance of the 1990s in establishing China and Southeast Asia’s presence on the world art stage.
Yishu has worked with Ciric a number of times over the past two decades both as a writer, interviewer, and guest editor. She has been a central figure in rescuing the history of art and exhibitions in Shanghai, and has worked on exhibitions and projects in various parts of the globe.
The texts selected for this issue of Yishu directly address China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and represent a variety of ideas and perspectives contributed by Ciric, Nikita Yingqian Cai, Julia Hartmann, Maggie J Zheng, Wang Ziyun, and Wei Yu. These are followed by a keynote address delivered by Qiu Zhijie summarizing some of his thoughts about the Chinese art world during the 1990s.
We thank all of them for the diligent research they carried out in preparing and presenting their texts.
The early exhibitions discussed in the various texts in Yishu 91 exemplify a period prior to the art market boom and are in large part artist initiated or self organized. All this has changed in the past two decades as growing market interests and the establishment of institutions have shifted the cultural ecology to create a strictly managed environment that artists often feel they must adhere to in order to achieve recognition.
The essays presented here serve as reminders of the possibilities of exhibition making, which can attain its integrity under the often challenging circumstances that have existed in the past, and undoubtedly will in the future.