Since the early 1980s, a number of Chinese artists has managed to study or exhibit abroad, and from time to time international shows, especially in Europe, presented post-Mao work that suggested the rise of an avant-garde in the People's Republic. Most notably, in 1993 Andreas Schmid and Hans van Dijk (a Belgian, soon to become a pioneering organizer and archivist within China) curated China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture, a sixty-artist survey at the Haus der Kulturen de Welt in Berlin. Nearly a score of mainland Chinese painters appeared in a group show at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and a few others turned up in subsequent installments. The seminal 1993 exhibition China's New Art, Post-1989, organized by scholar-dealer Chang Tsong-zung (Johnson Chang) with critic Li Xianting, was documented by an English-language book that reached far beyond the show's original Hong Kong venues. And in 1997, shortly after the first progressive galleries opened on the mainland, Texas expatriate Robert Bernell began to offer hundreds of English-language articles and books on new Chinese art through his Beijing and Hong Kong-based website, bookstore, and publishing company, today called Timezone 8.
- New China, New Art
Click the album below to view the full Timezone8 2009 catalogue.
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