During the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the censorious attitude that characterized China's post-1989 official response to contemporary art gave way to a new market-driven, culture industry valuation of art. Experimental artists who once struggled against state regulation of artistic expression found themselves being courted to advance China's international image. In Experimental Beijing Sasha Su-Ling Welland examines the interlocking power dynamics in this transformational moment and rapid rise of Chinese contemporary art into a global phenomenon. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and experience as a videographer and curator, Welland analyzes encounters between artists, curators, officials, and urban planners as they negotiated the social role of art and built new cultural institutions. Focusing on the contradictions and exclusions that emerged, Welland traces the complex gender politics involved and shows that feminist forms of art practice hold the potential to reshape consciousness, produce a nonnormative history of Chinese contemporary art, and imagine other, more just worlds.

About the Author
Sasha Su-Ling Welland is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington and author of A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters.

Reviews
"Drawing on her own ethnographic fieldwork, Welland investigates the power dynamics (traditional versus modern, male versus female) that played out in China as the role of experimental art was negotiated and new cultural institutions were erected." * Art in America *
"For all readers, including non-specialists, Welland should succeed in making lost lives and camouflaged histories visible and palpable. The limpid prose, theoretically informed structure and expanded multimedia materials available on the book's accompanying website would make it a captivating textbook for an advanced undergraduate course or a stimulating methodological text for graduate seminars. Marking a major contribution to the field, this is a masterful, thought-provoking and luminous text." -- Ros Holmes * Journal of Gender Studies *
"A much welcome addition not only to the expanding scholarship on contemporary Chinese art, but also to Chinese feminist art, and gender studies." -- Meiqin Wang * The China Quarterly *
"Experimental Beijing is a complex book that demands close reading not only by scholars interested in gender issues in art, but also those who wish for a multi-dimensional picture of the worlds of Chinese contemporary art." -- Doris Sung * China Perspectives *
"Through interviews and communications on other occasions with a broad range of people, including artists, curators, officials, and urban planners, Welland shows convincingly the particular world of those almost forgotten artists and their creative strivings. ... In so doing she creates a space for dialogue and cultural encounter in the text, averts the reader from the trap of translation and situates them in this admirably detailed account of the Chinese contemporary art world." -- Siying Duan & Jun Zeng * Visual Anthropology *
"Experimental Beijing is excellent at revealing the complex complicity between Chinese contemporary art and the new Chinese market economy and the heavy price that is paid by Chinese women artists for it." -- Chris Berry * Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology *
"Situated at the intersection of art history, anthropology, and gender studies, Experimental Beijing enacts incisive interventions in histories of Chinese contemporary art, global contemporary art, and feminist art.... Engagingly written with fluid and lyrical prose." -- Peggy Wang * The Art Bulletin *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822369431
Author Sasha Su-Ling Welland
Format Paperback
Page Count 360
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 612g