Beijing Xingwei – Contemporary Chinese Time–Based Art (Enactments) - Softcover

Cheng, Meiling

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0857420879 ISBN 13: 9780857420879

Publisher: Seagull Books, 2014

Synopsis

From cannibalism to light calligraphy, from self-harming to animal sacrifice, from meat entwined with sex toys to a commodity-embedded ice wall, the idiosyncratic output of Chinese time-based art over the past twenty-five years has invigorated contemporary global art movements and conversation. In Beijing Xingwei, Meiling Cheng engages with artworks created to mark China's rapid social, economic, cultural, intellectual, and environmental transformations in the post-Deng era. Beijing Xingwei - itself a critical artwork with text and images unfolding through the author's experiences with the mutable medium - contemplates the conundrum of creating site-specific ephemeral and performance-based artworks for global consumption. Here, Cheng shows us how art can reflect, construct, confound, and enrich us. And at a moment when time is explicitly linked with speed and profit, "Beijing Xingwei" provides multiple alternative possibilities for how people with imagination can spend, recycle, and invent their own time.

About this title

About the Author

Born and raised in Taiwan, Meiling Cheng is a noted performance art critic and poet and has published widely in both English and Chinese. She is associate professor in the School of Theatre at the University of Southern California and the author of In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art.

Edition details

• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0857420879
• ISBN 13: 9780857420879
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 420