杂志汇人民画报（英文版）

Integrating the broader culture of central China with Fujian and Guangdong provinces’ cultures, Zhangzhou puppets are a folk art treasure. As the inheritor of Zhangzhou puppets, one of the first National Intangible Cultural Heritage items, and a sixth-generation operator of Family Xu’s hand-made puppets, Xu Zhuchu employs the most traditional methods of carving, pasting and painting. His complicated and exquisite characters meet the dual standards of both stage performance utility and aesthetic prowess. Over his six decades of work, Xu created more than 600 characters, both magnificent and small, in a wide variety of styles and personalities. An exhibition of almost 400 puppets donated by Xu, including opera figures, Buddha, immortals and Taoists, this presentation traces the puppetmaking development achieved by Xu’s family over the last century. January 13 –

February 28, 2016 National Museum of China, Beijing

Trace of Existence

Trace of Existence explores the basic idea of the work of art as a record of its own creation. Juxtaposing eight positions from China and abroad, with works by Andrew Beck, Li Jinghu, Liang Shuo, Mateo López, Jon Pestoni, Shi Yong, Koki Tanaka, and Yang Guangnan, it explores ways in which medium and materiality function to structure a work’s rhetorical proposition and ultimately testify to its maker’s presence. Taking its title and inspiration from a radical underground exhibition curated by Feng Boyi in Beijing in January 1998, this exhibition reflects, through formally and conceptually disparate works, on the notion of “survival” in contemporary aesthetic practice.

January 24 – March 13, 2016 Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

Research Exhibition of Abstract Art in China

Abstract art is the logical destination of Western art and one of the most remarkable global modern art movements of the 20th Century. Chinese abstract art started at the end of the 1970s, and by the dawn of the 21st Century, a large group of abstract artists emerged, including a generation of artists who had left to study abroad shortly after the beginning of China’s reform and opening-up as well as domestic researchers and practitioners of abstract art. After 30 years of development, Chinese abstract art has developed a clear context and become an important facet of contemporary Chinese art. Sponsored by Chinese National Academy of Art and Research Center of Contemporary Arts, this exhibition not only displays works of 16 of China’s abstract art icons, but also endeavors to build a more extensive platform for abstract art education and promotion.

January 24 – March 13, 2016 Today Art Museum, Beijing

Let All Potential Be Internally Resolved in Beautiful Form No.22 by Shi Yong, mixed materials, 22cm x 162cm x 18cm, 2015, courtesy of the artist and Madein Gallery

Wang Fengge, a native of Shaanxi Province, graduated from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2009 and completed advanced studies from the same institution in 2011. Central to the vision that guides her paintings is a deep respect for classical Chinese brush-andink painting, the medium that has been used to create an extraordinary corpus of landscape and figure paintings for well over a thousand years. While appreciating the profundity of this tradition, however, she has no desire to work in the same manner, choosing instead to investigate how she might achieve the same effects in oil painting, the area of her specialization at the Academy. She has written that “through incorporating Western modernism and Chinese traditional freehand brushwork, I am trying to enrich the meanings which oil painting can convey. Through the combination of the essential qualities of Western and Eastern traditions, I want to find a connection point in my painting, in which Western rational structure and Eastern philosophical profundity can be bridged.”

January 7 – February 6, 2016 Chambers Fine Art, New York

A World in a Well by Song Dong, installation, 2015

Beijing-based Song Dong emerged from a strong Chinese avant-garde performing arts community and developed into a significant contemporary art figure driving the progression of Chinese conceptual art. Song graduated from the Fine Arts Department of Beijing’s Capital Normal University in 1989. His work ranges from performance and video to photography and sculpture, exploring ephemeral notions and the transience of human endeavor. Song Dong’s latest series, Surplus Value, is considered the completion of a trilogy introduced by the Waste Not and Wisdom of the Poor series. With the installments of Surplus Value, Song further explores the aesthetic value of everyday objects by altering garbage and refuse. After being discarded, objects have lost their original use value. The artist strips away their external form and internal function to craft uniquely delightful abstract installations.

December 19, 2015 – February 27, 2016 Pace Gallery, Beijing