The First Beijing Biennale, held in September of 2003 somewhat echoed the Venice Biennale in it's approach to expansive venues and activities. Although Chinese Officials are realising the importance of contemporary art and its role in promoting international activities in Beijing, it is the artists themselves who have managed to expand the scope of contemporary art events in the city. Furthermore the event hosted a series of forums and international conferences to promote dialogue between Chinese experts and their international counterparts.
With Traditional Chinese art education requiring students to master the painting styles of each historic period, it is not surpirising that Guan Wei's own style (having painted systematically from Impressionism to Postmodernism over ten years) has rendered his work appealing to Australian audiences. His works are cool in colour, surreal in style, quirky in wit. Wei's work displays a graphic sensibility and visual language similar to that of Leunig's cartoons and is successful for these exact reasons.
New media in China is probably the most rapidly developing medium used by contemporary artists in that country. As an art form new media characterises a form of communication with an almost endless capacity to be manipulated, making it the perfect tool to express a new artistic confidence. The intent of this article is the concentration on the work of one artist Wang Jianwei, whose work typifies many of the issues being expressed nationally through contemporary art. His is a practice differentiated by the way he slides from media to media allowing the intent of the art to govern the form of expression.
As similar to the changes that came to be called 'modernism' in the West in the nineteenth century, the nature of changing artistic traditions in the East are as far-reaching and as significant in that they also prefigure a contestation of the tradition/modernity duality. This article looks specifically at the tradition of Chinese ink painting and calligraphy and the insistence by Chinese critics that evolution - if not revolution - in these forms is occurring. Moreso the concentration here lies with modern calligraphy (xiandai shufu) and the distinguishing of calligraphy from the generalised use of Chinese characters in contemporary art.
The fabric of the contemporary art scene in China comprises the densely woven strands of politics, economics and aesthetics specific to the immediate socio-cultural framework: a cloth that is today increasingly more sophisticated that the coarse serge of the past. A vibrant contemporary art scene which emerged in the early 1980's following years of rampant cultural destruction and rigid doctrinal control over its form and content. This article focuses on the economic viability of contemporary Chinese art, a movement that found its key members a part of the lower socio-economic class.