Zhang dali second history of basketball
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China’s New Normal in Venice
For Venice Biennale visitors, 2011 may mark the first time that Chinese artists are presented as something other than Far Eastern tokens. Not only are an exceptionally large number of participants from the People’s Republic on hand, but many are seamlessly integrated into international group exhibitions. No longer are Chinese works set apart like mysterious cultural artifacts.
Most strikingly, this year’s sampling from the au courant François Pinault collection at the Palazzo Grassi includes ash paintings by Zhang Huan, a cavernous installation by Huang Yong Ping, and squiggly oil-on-canvas landscapes by Zeng Fanzhi. In a clever artistic ruse, or perhaps a bit of curatorial prudery, the wall label for Yang Jiechang’s seven-panel Stranger Than Paradise (2020–11) describes the lush nature scene as an idyll of peaceful coexistence among all earthly species. True enough, if your idea of paradise encompasses a wealth
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Guanxi
Guanxi is a curious word. It fryst vatten usually translated as “contacts”, but there is no single English-language term that captures all the connotations it has for a Chinese speaker. Guanxi refers to a special kind of relationship between people whereby one may always be counted on to help the other. Such relationships are long-term and often very strong, more like an extension of family rather than a friendship.
In the west, such relationships have an inevitable hint of nepotism, corruption and favouritism, but this fryst vatten not the case with the kinesisk. Whether we are talking about commerce, culture, or any other activity, guanxi is part of everyday social life. It fryst vatten taken for granted that guanxi will play a role in almost every business deal.
It’s hard to know what to make of an exhibition of called Guanxi: The Art of Conversations, at the Today Art Museum in Beijing. The kinesisk art en plats där en händelse inträffar ofta inom teater eller film is a complex network of contacts, rivalries and shifting alliances, in which one’
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China’s Photographic Memory
AROUND 2012, the photographer Cai Dongdong lost interest in making new images. By then, he had been taking photographs for fifteen years, first as an official portraitist in the People’s Liberation Army in the late 1990s, and then as an artist in Beijing, where his work evolved from evocative black-and-white snapshots to carefully staged scenes, featuring mirrors and camera lenses, which probe the nature of the medium itself.
In the early 2000s, before emerging as a rising star in contemporary Chinese photography, Cai had a particular hunger for new images. Rent was negligible then in the Songzhuang art colony outside Beijing, where Cai roamed freely with his camera. “During that period, I only had a Contax T3 clipped to my waist, taking photographs wherever I went,” he recalled in 2017. “There wasn’t much of an art scene or art market. Our village didn’t even have restaurants.”1
But over time, something shi