I arrived in China in 2005 with a secondhand camera, a laptop and a plan to try to make a living from photography within a year. In the end, I spent 12 years in Shanghai, where I managed to earn enough from commercial work to do projects of my own. When I first spotted people sleeping in public, it completely broke the image I had of China. Like many in the west, I had a preconceived idea of the country as an economic monster and of its people working uncomplainingly,…
Tag: Art and design
‘I didn’t feel like I was supporting a regime’: architect David Chipperfield on working for China
A young woman wearing a short pleated skirt and a white bobble hat is posing for photos on a street corner in Shanghai, telling her friend to ensure that a red brick, colonial-era building features in the background. Nearby, a woman in stilettos and fur coat is being photographed in an arched doorway framed by classical mouldings, while another perches on a windowsill, coffee in hand next to a carved column. The alleyways behind are filled with similar scenes: people posing on steps, next to lampposts or in front of…
London gallery delays Ai Weiwei show over Israel-Hamas tweet
The artist Ai Weiwei has defended the importance of free speech after a London gallery put his show on hold over a tweet about the Israel-Hamas war. The exhibition of new works by the Chinese dissident, which was due to open at the Lisson gallery this week, was indefinitely put on hold after a tweet posted in response to a follower’s question on X which has since been deleted. It read: “The sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been, at times, transferred to offset the…
Blockbuster show on Genghis Khan opens in France after row with China
It was a major cultural row between France and China, prompting a history museum to pull the plug on one of its most important exhibitions of the decade accusing the Beijing authorities of interference and trying to rewrite history. But now the Chateau des ducs de Bretagne history museum in Nantes has finally opened its blockbuster exhibition on Genghis Khan and the Mongol empire, with large crowds queueing to see hundreds of objects that have never been shown in Europe, some dug up by archaeologists only three years ago. It…
‘China is not just one entity’: major exhibition aims to showcase unseen diversity
Although little-known in the west, China’s Jiangnan region has played a pivotal role in thousands of years of the country’s history. “It’s as if Ohio produced 20% of the GDP of the United States,” said Clarissa von Spee, curator with the Cleveland Museum of Art. “It’s pretty powerful, this region, and it has remained so for centuries.” Producing many of the products most strongly associated with China, including jade and silk, it is a cultural powerhouse that is about to finally get its due in the United States. For the…
The London art student whose Chinese political slogan mural caused a storm
When Wang Hanzheng, a Chinese student at the Royal College of Art, attended a graduate show in a warehouse on Brick Lane in east London in July, he found the space crowded, unimaginative and unfit for presenting art. It was with this in mind that at 11pm one night earlier this month Wang and a team of 22 others painted a Chinese political slogan in bold red characters along a nearby wall stretching nearly 100 metres. The artwork – which spelled out the Chinese government’s “socialist core values”, including the…
What will life after globalisation look like? The Venice Biennale may hold the answer | Lorenzo Marsili
This year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, titled Laboratory for the Future, was inaugurated on the same day that the leaders of the G7 industrialised nations met in Hiroshima. As different as these events appeared, both signalled the end of globalisation. Both also displayed the promise and perils of a fragmenting world. Of all the arts, architecture is the most globally homogenising. Erecting tropical copycats of Paris and London was a staple of European colonial policy. Today, the same glass-and-steel tower blocks dot interchangeable financial capitals the world over. But the 2023…
China tries to shut down Australian artist’s show promoted by image of cannibalistic Xi
A Chinese-Australian artist has called for more support from the Australian government after Chinese officials tried to shut down his latest show in Poland. The artist, who goes by the name Badiucao, is due to launch his latest exhibition at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw on Friday. <gu-island name="TweetBlockComponent" deferuntil="visible" props="{"element":{"_type":"model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TweetBlockElement","html":" #Breaking 🇵🇱 @u_jazdowski art center ‘s website is briefly down for unknown reason.The art center is hosting my new exhibition #TellChinasStoryWell on June 16.Yesterday Chinese embassy visited venue again to express complain against the show.…
China’s Hidden Century review – a revelation from first to last
She wears jade earrings and a midnight blue jacket, embroidered in gold to its mandarin collar. She sits very still, staring straight back at you from her watchful closeup. You could pick her out of a crowd, this shrewd woman with the incisive look and stringently combed hair – except that she no longer exists. For this is not now. Nor is this a photograph, as it might at first seem, skimming a face from life in some Chinese city. In fact this is an ancestral portrait from Guanghzu province,…
China’s Hidden Century review – how opium and Christianity demolished a civilisation
In 1860 British and French troops pillaged and destroyed the Summer Palace of China’s Qing emperors, carrying off pieces of art and chunks of architecture – and a tiny, hairy dog who belonged to the emperor. Looty, as the dog was renamed with impeccable bad taste, was given to Queen Victoria and was the first “Pekinese” in Britain. A portrait of Looty is one of the many arresting images and facts in what must be the strangest blockbuster the British Museum has ever staged. In 2007, this museum put on…