Art of Change: New Directions from China

Art of Change is the first catalogue to traceout a very particular seam of performative Chinese art from the late 1980s to the present, as manifested in the work of eight artists: Liang Shaoji, Wang Jianwei, Xu Zhen/MadeInCompany, Gu Dexin, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Chen Zhen and Yingmei Duan. Often working on a grand scale, they invite the audience to engage with overwhelming, theatrical, yet ephemeral experiences—works which transform over time, like Xu Zhen’s Actions of Consciousness, in which concealed assistants make colorful sculptures, and toss them into the airfrom inside a sealed white cube. Published to coincide with a major exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery, this book explores the political, social and cultural conditions shaping contemporary Chinese sculpture.